Climate Negotiators Are Seriously Underestimating Methane’s Warming Power – Mother Jones

An oil well in Watford City (North Dakota). Methane is released when methane leaks from fossil fuel infrastructure such as oil wells.Matthew Brown/AP

This story was originally published in Yale Environment 360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

A sudden surgeInternational efforts to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius are undermining due to an increase in methane emissions. Scientists warn that the task of halting the surge is becoming more difficult because climate negotiators underestimate by three the warming effect methane will have over a critical quarter-century to reach net-zero emissions as per the 2015 Paris Agreement.

According to scientists, governments aren’t paying enough attention in curbing methane. This includes sealing pipelines, plugging abandoned gas lines, sealing pipelines, covering up landfills, and preventing crop damage.

This problem is caused by a long-standing convention which states that the warming effects of different planetwarming gases are measured according to their average effect over 100 years. Scientists agree that this was fine when the world was aiming to stabilize temperatures by the end the century. Now that the goal is to stop warming at a level that can be reached by midcentury, scientists say that it is not fit for purpose. It drastically underestimates methane’s importance, which usually lasts less than a decade but has the greatest warming impact.

Two new studies have recently called on climate negotiators for adjustments to their formulae to compare different greenhouse gases in order to keep it in line with the Paris Agreement’s timeline. Sam Abernethy is a Stanford University Physics PhD student. He believes that the adjustment would increase methane emissions and reduce peak temperatures by as much as 0.2 degrees Celsius (0.36 degrees F).

“The more aggressive the temperature goal, the more important potent, short-lived greenhouse gases such as methane become,” says Rob Jackson, professor of energy and environment at Stanford University. In a New analysis with Abernethy, Jackson calculates that measured on a timeframe to the mid-2040s—the likely deadline for capping warming under the Paris Agreement—methane is three times more important than assumed under existing regulations.

“We are severely undervaluing methane,” says Abernethy. “We need drastic climate action in the short term to achieve our Paris Agreement goals. Methane is the best lever to make that happen.”

This will require action not only against oil and gas infrastructure leaks, but also against biogenic sources such as landfills, livestock, and other biogenic sources. But achieving that is being undermined by what Abernethy calls the “arbitrary and unjustified” timeframe under which regulators currently assess the gas.

A second new study suggests that negotiators should create a separate target for cutting methane emissions. However, scientists warn against focusing too heavily on reaching short-term temperature targets with methane action if this leads to higher CO2 emission that causes longer-term warming.

According to the study, two-fifths (25%) of methane emission comes from natural sources such as microbes in wetlands. The rest is generated by human activities. These include landfills and flooded ricefields, the guts of cattle, and gas and oil well leaks and pipelines leaks. Euan Nisbet, a leading analyst of Royal Holloway, University of London.

A New analysis of industrial methane emissions published this week by the International Energy Agency (IEA) highlighted the importance of unrecorded emissions leaking from coal mines.

Thanks to constantly rising emissions, the concentration of methane in the atmosphere has almost tripled since preindustrial times—a far bigger increase than for the most important gas, carbon dioxide. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration published its last month’s report. Published data showing a record jump in 2021 to 1,900 parts per billion, compared to a preindustrial level of 700 parts per billion. According to the IEA about 30% of current warming can be attributed to this gas.

The technical challenges in curbing methane are diverse. They include the need to cap abandoned oil wells and to breed cattle that produce less methane as well as providing incentives for farmers not to burn crop waste. However, current regulations regarding greenhouse gases are not well-suited for the task.

International agreements for net-zero emissions bundle together all greenhouse gases, including methane, with their warming effect assessed according to their “CO2 equivalent,” as measured over 100 years. This allows countries to be flexible in meeting their Paris pledges. Scientists say it is dangerous and misleading because it does not consider the different lifetimes for the gases.

Most of the CO2 today will remain in our atmosphere and continue to warm the planet for many centuries. However, methane emissions have a significant impact on the first ten years, but then quickly disappear. The idea of averaging the warming effects of each gas over 100 year covers the larger but shorter-term impact of methane. This comparison is designed to maximize the CO2’s impact and minimize methane’s.

Partly because of this, methane has been neglected by climate-change researchers and regulators. They have focused on assessing and reducing CO2. However, this is changing as methane’s short term impact on the environment is becoming more prominent.

At the Climate conference in Glasgow last November, the Biden administration and the European Union, representing two of the world’s top five methane emitters, launched a Global Methane Pledge aimed at cutting emissions by 30 percent by 2030.

To date, 111 countries have signed the pledge. Notable absentees are India, Russia and China, which together account for nearly a third of global greenhouse gas emissions. But methane emissions were reduced. This feature is very important in the US-China Glasgow Declaration, under which China agreed to develop an action plan that would have a “significant effect” on its methane emissions this decade. Activists eager to see if China lives up will be watching for a promise in the declaration that the two nations would “convene a meeting in the first half of 2022 to focus on the specifics of enhancing measurement and mitigation of methane.”

Last month, the White House was for its part. Announced Plans to spend more than a billion dollars tackling what it calls “super-polluting methane emissions”—mainly leaks from the country’s 130,000-plus abandoned gas and oil wells. A recent survey in Texas found that only 30 of the country’s old wells were releasing about 1.2 million gallons of methane. 100,000 tonnes of methane each year.

The United States has the second-largest concentrations of these super-sources. They are located in the oil and gas fields of Russia and Turkmenistan. The latter—another no-show on the Global Methane Pledge—is a secretive gas-rich Central Asian state beset by old Soviet-era technology. According to AnalysisKayrros, a Paris-based data analysis company, used satellite sensors to measure methane plumes data. In 2019, 31 of the 50 worst methane emissions from offshore oil and gas operations were from Turkmenistan. Other major emitters of oil and natural gas from installations were identified by the IEA as Iran, Venezuela, Algeria and Iraq.

The good news is that, once they are identified, these “super sources” can usually be shut cheaply, by plugging wells and sealing leaks in pipelines. Many of these measures could result in financial gains by selling the methane saved. You can find out more at www.aaa.org. Study of the Kayrros data published in ScienceThomas Lauvaux, Penn State University, and his colleagues estimated that Turkmenistan could benefit from plugging leaking pipelines and wells by $6 billion annually. “At today’s elevated gas prices, nearly all the emissions from oil and gas operations worldwide could be avoided at no net cost,” said IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol.

The US-EU pledge to reduce methane was supported by funding institutions such as the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), the European Investment Bank (EIB) and the UN Green Climate Fund (UN Green Climate Fund), which promised to work with both the US and EU to reduce methane. Offer assistance for countries aiming to meet their climate commitments through cutting methane emissions.

But the bad news is that fixing these big concentrated sources of methane won’t be enough to curb rising emissions. The IEA estimates that 40 percent of methane emitted from human activity is due to the oil, coal, and gas industries. However, isotopic analysis can differentiate between different sources of methane based on the ratios carbon-12 to carbon-13. This allows for the identification of the main cause of the rapid increase in methane emissions over the past 15 year.

“Although fossil fuel emissions may still be growing, soaring methane emissions are now primarily the result of faster-growing biogenic sources,” Nisbet. The majority of the increase has been caused by natural wetlands, flooded rice field, landfills, livestock in the tropics, and livestock in those areas. As methane-generating microbes thrive in warmer and wetter environments, there is increasing concern that this surge could be a reflection of climate change.

Climate scientists have warned for decades that melting permafrost could release huge amounts of methane from the Arctic, which could lead to more warming. However, it seems that tropical forests are already doing the same thing. “Is warming feeding warming? It seems likely,” says Nisbet.

The effort to reduce emissions will therefore have to be made wide-ranging. There are technologies that can remove methane from the air if it is concentrated in confined spaces like cattle barns or coal-mine ventilation systems. He says that landfills can be treated as gas reserves and tapped for fuel. If that is not possible, they can be covered to prevent emissions.

As ways to reduce agricultural sources, there have been suggestions for reducing the amount of crop waste being burned by farmers, breeding methane-producing cattle, and halting the flooding of rice fields.

However, climate scientists believe that the downplaying the warming potential of greenhouse gases in the formulae to assess their warming potential decreases the incentive for governments invest in such reductions. That’s because such efforts will contribute only a small amount to cutting emissions to the target of “net zero.”

To overcome this trap, an international group of researchers, led in January by Myles Alle of the University of Oxford, formed. Designed to be replaced the single 100-year “CO2 equivalent” target with two targets—one for emissions of long-term gases such as CO2 and the other for the short-term gases, principally methane.

Abernethy says that this makes sense. However, even with two targets, it is necessary to compare the different gases at some point, based on their impact on the climate. “We need a way to value reductions in one bucket compared to reductions in the other bucket,” says Abernethy. “We argue that it should be weighting based on their impact on achieving the Paris Agreement.”

Abernethy’s new analysis provides the metric for doing that, by working out exactly how much greater the methane warming effect is over the years that matter for fulfilling the Paris Agreement. It shows that methane molecules will be 75 times more powerful in warming the atmosphere over the period from 2045 than CO2 molecules. This compares with 28 currently used UN negotiators’ figures and 25 still in use at the US Environmental Protection Agency.

Some researchers question the wisdom of focusing too much on short-term calculations to reduce methane emissions. “If limited funds are spent on methane cuts instead of CO2 cuts, then temperatures will be lower in the short term, but higher in the long term,” warns Michelle CainCranfield University, environmental data analyst

Abernethy agrees Cain has a point. His own quarter century-time framing of the world is as scientifically arbitrary and arbitrary as the traditional one-century framing. “But at least it is consistent with international policymaking priorities.”

Most other climate scientists spoken to for this article took a similar view and backed Abernethy’s approach. Keith Shine, a meteorologist at the University of Reading and co-author of Allen’s paper, says that making the calculations about the warming effect of different gases consistent with international climate priorities “opens the door to more informed, and cost-effective, policy choices.”

Although the recalibration to focus on methane reductions is supported largely by the climate-science community it remains to be seen if it will find favor with climate negotiators. No government has submitted a formal proposal to the UN Climate Convention to make the changes. Any such proposal would be controversial, as it would have significant implications for countries’ efforts to reduce their emissions. There would be winners in the countries that have the potential to reduce methane emissions and losers in the ones that don’t.

Shine doubts that negotiators will be willing to open this can of worms. He says the UN political process “is much more conservative, and appears irreversibly committed to using the 100-year timeframe, in spite of much evidence that it is not fit for the purpose of meeting temperature targets.”

If this is the case, it’s now more difficult to stop the planet warming from happening anytime soon.