Evaluation of Current and Emerging Methane Emission Quantification Tools for Upstream Oil and Gas Facilities

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Climate change causes mass extinctions, disasters, migrations, and growing social injustice, all of which arerapidly intensifying as the planet warms. The upstream oil and gas sector is the second largest source ofanthropogenic methane emissions within Canada, which contribute to an alarming rise in droughts, forest fires,and heat waves across Canada and around the world. In order to curtail these emissions, new policies andregulations are being introduced to reduce methane emissions from facilities, operations, and processes.Accordingly, Canada's oil and gas producers and provincial regulators need technologies and methods toinventory methane emissions, and identify the most cost-effective strategies to reduce these emissions. Climatemodellers need reliable emissions data for their simulations, which provincial and federal governments use toinform policy needed to fulfil international treaty obligations and avoid the worst consequences of climatechange.In order to address this need, the Petroleum Technology Alliance Canada (PTAC) and the Clean ResourcesInnovation Network (CRIN) have commissioned the University of Waterloo (UW), in partnership withArolytics, Inc., a Canadian SME specializing in methane emissions analytics, and Carbon ManagementCanada, a not-for-profit organization committed to developing technology for reducing greenhouse gasemissions, to survey available candidate methane quantifications systems, and identify those most suitable forreducing emissions from upstream oil and gas operations. UW, Arolytics, and CMC will combine theircomplementary expertise and resources to evaluate systems through statistical analysis, laboratory testing, andfield trials that recreate key industrial emission scenarios. Crucially, the UW team will develop rigorousstatistical procedures for assessing the uncertainty of methane emissions estimates, which end-users ofemissions data need to interpret these quantities.