COP29: Satellites spot methane leaks – however ‘super-emitters’ don’t repair them

The world has extra methods than ever to identify the invisible methane emissions accountable for a 3rd of worldwide warming thus far. However in response to a report launched on the COP29 local weather summit, methane “super-emitters” not often take motion when alerted that they’re leaking giant quantities of the potent greenhouse gasoline.

“We’re not seeing the transparency and the sense of urgency that we require,” says Manfredi Caltagirone, director of the United Nations Surroundings Programme’s Worldwide Methane Emissions Observatory, which lately launched a system that makes use of satellite tv for pc information to alert methane emitters about leaks.

Methane is the second most essential greenhouse gasoline to deal with, behind carbon dioxide, and a rising variety of nations have promised to slash methane emissions so as to keep away from near-term warming. Eventually 12 months’s COP28 local weather summit, most of the world’s largest oil and gasoline corporations additionally pledged to “eliminate” methane emissions from their operations.

At this time, a rising variety of satellites are starting to detect methane leaks from the greatest sources of such emissions: oil and gasoline infrastructure, coal mines, landfill and agriculture. That information is essential to holding emitters to account, says Mark Brownstein on the Environmental Protection Fund, an environmental advocacy group that lately launched its personal methane-sensing satellite tv for pc. “But data by itself doesn’t solve the problem,” he says.

The primary 12 months of the UN methane alert system illustrates the yawning hole between information and motion. Over the previous 12 months, the programme issued 1225 alerts to governments and firms when it recognized plumes of methane from oil and gasoline infrastructure giant sufficient to be detected from area. It now reviews that emitters solely took steps to manage these leaks 15 instances, a response fee of about 1 per cent.

There are a selection of doable causes for this, says Caltagirone. Emitters would possibly lack technical or monetary sources and a few sources of methane might be tough to chop off, though emissions from oil and gasoline infrastructure are extensively seen to be the simplest to take care of. “It’s plumbing. It’s not rocket science,” he says.

One other rationalization is likely to be that emitters are nonetheless getting used to the brand new alert system. Nonetheless, different methane screens have reported an analogous lack of response. “Our success rate is not much better,” says Jean-Francois Gauthier at GHGSat, a Canadian firm that has issued comparable satellite tv for pc alerts for years. “It’s on the order of 2 or 3 per cent.”

There have been some successes. As an illustration, the UN issued a number of alerts this 12 months to the Algerian authorities a few methane supply that had been repeatedly leaking since at the least 1999, with a world warming impact equal to half 1,000,000 vehicles pushed for a 12 months. By October, satellite tv for pc information confirmed it had disappeared.

However the total image suggests monitoring isn’t but translating into emission reductions. “Simply showing methane plumes is not enough to generate action,” says Rob Jackson at Stanford College in California. A core drawback he sees is that satellites not often reveal who owns the leaky pipeline or the methane-emitting effectively, making accountability tough.

Methane is a serious subject of debate on the COP29 assembly, now beneath manner in Baku, Azerbaijan. A summit this week on “non-CO2 greenhouse gases”, convened by the US and China, noticed nations announce a number of actions on methane emissions. They embrace a charge on methane within the US, which is geared toward oil and gasoline emitters – though many count on the incoming Trump administration to undo that rule.