Measuring Methane Emissions One of the Keys to Combatting Climate Change
By Dan Rubinstein
December 14, 2021
At the United Nations COP26 climate change summit in Glasgow, U.S. President Joe Biden vowed to crack down on emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas with an impact on global warming several dozen times stronger than that of carbon dioxide.
Canada is one of more than 100 countries to sign the Global Methane Pledge, which aims to reduce worldwide methane emissions by 30 per cent below 2020 levels and to reduce methane emissions from the oil and gas industry by at least 75 per cent below 2012 levels by 2030.
But before industry can cut emissions at wells, compressor stations, storage tanks or the 40 or so different types of major infrastructure, and before governments can impose more strict regulations, they need to better understand where—and how much—methane is being released.
Carleton Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Prof. Matthew Johnson, director of the university’s Energy and Emissions Research Laboratory (EERL), is in the midst of a multi-year project using airborne and ground-based technologies to measure methane at more than 8,000 active energy production sites from Manitoba to British Columbia.
“Our goal is to create the first measurement-based methane inventory in Canada,” says Johnson, whose approximately $2.5 million project is supported by Natural Resources Canada, the B.C. government, Environmental Defense Fund and his own NSERC Discovery Accelerator grant.