Measuring the methane footprint of Canadian oil and gas operations

甲烷是一种短暂的气候污染物，在100年的时间跨度内，其辐射加热潜力是二氧化碳的约30倍。在石油和天然气生产现场，甲烷在天然气燃烧、泄气、逃逸泄漏以及燃烧、储存和搬运过程中排放。加拿大的甲烷排放清单并不反映生产现场的实际排放量，我们很可能会损失约2.5亿美元的天然气，产生的二氧化碳排放量与加拿大所有轻型卡车的排放量相似。这项建议侧重于以科学的方式高效、经济高效地跟踪和预测区域至国家层面的甲烷库存水平，这是政府监管机构决策和国际报告所需的粒度，但缺乏方法学。我的长期目标是制定可行的方法，在大范围内测量短期气候污染物，以验证库存估计。我在未来五年的短期目标是： 1.衡量感兴趣地点的石油和天然气甲烷排放量的时空趋势，作为评估新的清查方法和卫星测量业绩的控制 2.为加拿大开发新的多来源(石油和天然气、湿地、农业)网格甲烷清单，可与卫星测量协同使用 3.探索新的卫星甲烷数据产品，并对照控制数据和过去的数据集进行校准 这项研究将涉及加拿大西部陆上石油和天然气地理区域的年度现场活动，这些数据将与其他数据库一起用于验证和校准新的甲烷测量卫星。监管机构和公众是这项研究的主要受益者，因为它将提供理想的途径，使我们能够以低廉的成本监督和跟踪温室气体和相关污染物排放的进展。

Methane is a short-lived climate pollutant with a radiative heating potential ~30x higher than that of carbon dioxide over a 100-year timespan. At sites of oil and gas production, methane is emitted during natural gas flaring, venting, fugitive leakage, and from combustion, storage, and handling. Methane emission inventories in Canada don't reflect the actual amount being released from sites of production, and it's likely we lose ~$250M in natural gas, creating a CO2-e footprint similar to that of all light duty trucks in Canada. This proposal focuses on science to efficiently and cost-effectively track and predict methane inventory levels at the regional to national scale, which is the granularity needed by government regulators for decision making and international reporting but where methodologies are lacking. My long term objective is to develop workable methodologies for measuring short lived climate pollutants at large scales, to validate inventory estimates. My short term objectives over the next five years are to: 1. Measure spatiotemporal trends in oil and gas methane emissions at sites of interest, to use as controls for assessing new inventory methodologies and performance of satellite measurements 2. Develop new multi-source (oil and gas, wetland, agriculture) gridded methane inventories for Canada that can be used synergistically with satellite measurements 3. Explore new satellite methane data products, and calibrate against control data and past datasets The research will involve annual field campaigns at western Canadian onshore oil and gas geographies, and these data will be used in conjunction with other databases to validate and calibrate new methane measurement satellites. Regulators and the general public are the main beneficiaries of this research, because it will ideally yield pathways by which we can inexpensively oversee and track progress on greenhouse and associated pollutant releases.