Remote sensing of methane leakage from natural gas and petroleum systems revisited

The switch from the use of coal to natural gas or oil for energy generation potentially reduces greenhouse gas emissions and thus the impact on global warming and climate change because of the higher energy creation per CO2 molecule emitted. However, the climate benefit over coal is offset by methane (CH4) leakage from natural gas and petroleum systems, which reverses the climate impact mitigation if the rate of fugitive emissions exceeds the compensation point at which the global warming resulting from the leakage and the benefit from the reduction of coal combustion coincide. Consequently, an accurate quantification of CH4 emissions from the oil and gas industry is essential to evaluate the suitability of natural gas and petroleum as bridging fuels on the way to a carbon-neutral future. We show that regional CH4 release from large oil and gas fields can be monitored from space by using dense daily recurrent measurements of the TROPOspheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI) onboard the Sentinel-5 Precursor satellite to quantify emissions and leakage rates. The average emissions for the time period 2018/2019 from the five most productive basins in the United States, the Permian, Appalachian, Eagle Ford, Bakken, and Anadarko, are estimated to be 3.18±1.13, 2.36±0.88, 1.37±0.63, 0.89±0.56, and 2.74±0.74 Mt yr−1, respectively. This corresponds to CH4 leakage rates relative to the associated production between 1.2 % and 1.4 % for the first four production regions, which are consistent with bottom-up estimates and likely fall below the break-even leakage rate for immediate climate benefit. For the Anadarko Basin, the fugitive emission rate is larger and amounts to 3.9±1.1 %, which likely exceeds the break-even rate for immediate benefit and roughly corresponds to the break-even rate for a 20-year time horizon. The determined values are smaller than previously derived satellite-based leakage rates for the time period 2009–2011, which was an early phase of hydraulic fracturing, indicating that it is possible to improve the climate footprint of the oil and gas industry by adopting new technologies and that efforts to reduce methane emissions have been successful. For two of the world's largest natural gas fields, Galkynysh and Dauletabad in Turkmenistan, we find collective methane emissions of 3.26±1.17 Mt yr−1, which corresponds to a leakage rate of 4.1±1.5 %, suggesting that the Turkmen energy industry is not employing methane emission avoidance strategies and technologies as successfully as those currently widely used in the United States. The leakage rates in Turkmenistan and in the Anadarko Basin indicate that there is potential to reduce fugitive methane emissions from natural gas and petroleum systems worldwide. In particular, relatively newly developed oil and gas plays appear to have larger leakage rates compared to more mature production areas.