Measuring the methane footprint of Canadian oil and gas operations

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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.