Satellite quantification of oil and natural gas methane emissions in the US and Canada including contributions from individual basins
Name
acp-22-11203-2022.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
2.91 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
f5c7f43b5fe440569e91650164301967
Author(s)
Shen, Lu
Gautam, Ritesh
Omara, Mark
Zavala-Araiza, Daniel
Maasakkers, Joannes D
Scarpelli, Tia R
Lorente, Alba
Lyon, David
Sheng, Jianxiong
Varon, Daniel J
Date Issued
September 2, 2022
Journal
Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics
Publisher
Copernicus GmbH
Version
Final published version
Abstract
We use satellite methane observations from the Tropospheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI), for May 2018 to February 2020, to quantify methane emissions from individual oil and natural gas (O/G) basins in the US and Canada using a high-resolution (∼ 25 km) atmospheric inverse analysis. Our satellite-derived emission estimates show good consistency with in situ field measurements (R = 0.96) in 14 O/G basins distributed across the US and Canada. Aggregating our results to the national scale, we obtain O/G-related methane emission estimates of 12.6 ± 2.1 Tg a−1 for the US and 2.2 ± 0.6 Tg a−1 for Canada, 80 % and 40 %, respectively, higher than the national inventories reported to the United Nations. About 70 % of the discrepancy in the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) inventory can be attributed to five O/G basins, the Permian, Haynesville, Anadarko, Eagle Ford, and Barnett basins, which in total account for 40 % of US emissions. We show more generally that our TROPOMI inversion framework can quantify methane emissions exceeding 0.2–0.5 Tg a−1 from individual O/G basins, thus providing an effective tool for monitoring methane emissions from large O/G basins globally.
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-22-11203-2022
