Though not quite a silver bullet in the fight against methane emissions, MethaneSAT was something more like an effective and well-placed spy. But just over a year into its five-year mission, the satellite stopped working.

On June 20, the boxy, solar-powered device passed over the North Pole and made a link with the High Arctic ground station in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard. The communication was normal and there were no signs of trouble. But less than an hour later, after travelling half the circumference of the world at 27,000 kilometres per hour, it had gone silent as it hurtled over the South Pole.

EDF has not made contact with the methane-tracking satellite since it mysteriously stopped communicating that day. Subsequent photos taken from space show that the satellite is intact and its trajectory has not changed. EDF has commissioned an anomaly review board to figure out what happened, but the results have not been published.

A new height of ambition

For many, MethaneSAT was a preeminent symbol of human ingenuity in the face of the overwhelming challenge of shifting our entire energy system away from fossil fuels. The project has been lionized in the media and awarded generous philanthropic funding to cover the US$88-million cost to build and launch it into space, including from the Bezos Earth Fund.

Methane, which is responsible for about 30% of global warming, traps around 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. But it also has a much shorter lifespan in the atmosphere, so lowering its emissions is considered a low-hanging fruit for effective climate action – especially because natural gas consists almost entirely of methane, so the industry is theoretically incentivized to avoid bleeding it off into the atmosphere from leaky operations.

“Despite the scale of the problem, solving it is largely cost-effective,” Dominic Watson, a senior manager on the energy transition team at EDF, has said. Plugging leaks also isn’t overly complicated: “It’s plumbing, it’s not rocket science.”

MethaneSAT’s wasn’t the only satellite tracking methane emissions from space, but it was the only one built specifically for this task, and it could measure methane “over large areas but with enough precision to identify specific facilities and oil wells,” The New York Times has reported. The satellite’s high-precision spectrometer could detect tiny differences in the concentration of methane molecules – as little as two to three parts per billion – from 580 kilometres in the sky.

But providing a critical new vantage on worldwide methane emissions wasn’t the only thing that made MethaneSAT special. It also demonstrated that complex and expensive ventures to combat climate change could be realized outside the framework of government or private industry. The satellite represented, both figuratively and literally, a new height of ambition for environmental non-profits.

Coming in the midst of a dramatic reversal on climate policy by the U.S. administration, MethaneSAT’s untimely ending was a most unwelcome development for the climate movement. The announcement that the satellite had gone dark was met with an online outpouring of sadness and disappointment.

But in New Zealand, which contributed NZ$32 million to the overall project, the response among some scientists has been different. They aren’t sad. They’re mad about it.

A troubled relationship

“We were played like a fiddle by these guys,” says Richard Easther, an astrophysicist who was consulted by the New Zealand government about the project, speaking via video call from his office at the University of Auckland, where he teaches in the physics department.

Easther views his government’s sizable investment in MethaneSAT as “a once-in-a-generation opportunity to have a huge technical leap in a globally significant area.” New Zealand joined the project in an effort to boost its aerospace sector. Instead, the country “settled for what was always going to be a participation trophy at best,” he argues.

The satellite stopped working just days before students and faculty at the Te Pūnaha Ātea Space Institute at the University of Auckland were scheduled to assume control of the mission, following several months of delays. The failure to transition control to the university at the original deadline in March prompted mounting public frustration and calls for transparency.

Easther is leading the criticism and has called for a no-blame review to understand “how New Zealand blew past so many red flags about MethaneSAT’s operation.” He alleges that the mission operators “kept pumping out upbeat comms even after it became apparent that the spacecraft had major problems.”

Methane trackers pick up the slack as U.S. regulatory pressure evaporates

Easther’s ire is directed mainly at his own government, for spending so much money on a space project without soliciting bids for other projects. “It’s not the result of a competitive call for proposals or a pre-existing need,” he says.

New Zealand does contribute to the world’s methane problem, but its emissions come from livestock – those famous cow and sheep burps – not oil and gas. “If we wanted to understand agricultural methane . . . there’s dozens of other things we could have done and they may have been more effective,” Easther claims.

‘Typical teething issues’

The story behind New Zealand’s involvement with MethaneSAT begins with Peter Beck, who holds the title of “the world’s newest space billionaire.” He is the founder and CEO of Rocket Lab, the upstart competitor to SpaceX whose shares have gone interstellar in the past year.

Rocket Lab puts satellites into space and has made New Zealand the third-most-frequent country to launch rockets to orbit after the United States and China – a feat that Beck achieved without the benefit of a university degree. New Zealanders are proud of him the way Americans used to be proud of Elon Musk. So when Beck said he wanted to get involved with MethaneSAT, people paid attention.

Rocket Lab’s stunning success in launching satellites was a prime factor that brought the Environmental Defense Fund into partnership with the New Zealand government in 2018. In the end, MethaneSAT grew too big for Rocket Lab, which specializes in smaller launches, and SpaceX won the contract. “If we’d known right from the beginning that Rocket Lab wouldn’t launch it, I am sure the conversation would not have happened,” Easther says.

MethaneSAT’s utility for tracking agricultural methane emissions was also misrepresented, according to reporting by Eloise Gibson, a climate change correspondent for New Zealand’s public broadcaster RNZ. When EDF approached the New Zealand Space Agency at the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment about the idea for the partnership, staff saw it as an opportunity to position New Zealand as a serious player in both space science and climate change, she reported.

Gibson obtained communications by space agency staff at the time. They wrote that “the satellite will be able to detect emissions from agriculture” and “importantly . . . should be able to provide data that would enable more precise measurement of methane emissions in New Zealand and help inform policy related to agricultural emissions.”

They were wrong. New Zealand scientists told the space agency the mission was “hopelessly oversold” for livestock gas tracking and “would not add much to New Zealand’s understanding of its greenhouse gas profile from farming,” Gibson reported. The agency ultimately realized the error, but the rationale persisted in underpinning the nation’s involvement in the project.

Jon Coifman, a spokesperson for MethaneSAT, wrote in an email that the purpose of New Zealand’s research investment was to “gain deeper insight and understanding into the usefulness of high precision methane measurements in understanding agricultural methane emissions” – that is, to study the satellite’s applicability for this task.

Once the satellite was in space, it suffered ongoing technical issues that delayed its scheduled handover to the control station at the University of Auckland. One of its three thrusters repeatedly malfunctioned, and increased solar activity caused it to go into “safe mode” multiple times. Rather than being handed off to New Zealand scientists, control was transferred back to its manufacturer, Blue Canyon Technologies in Colorado.

Craig Rodger, a professor of physics at New Zealand’s University of Otago, has questioned whether solar activity should have been so disruptive: “There have been moments when it’s been interesting in the last year and a bit, but there have not been extreme conditions in the space environment,” he wrote in published comments. “We’re talking about normal, slightly active conditions . . . Typically, people build their equipment to handle that.”

Coifman describes these difficulties as “typical teething issues.” Solar activity has not been attributed as a reason for MethaneSAT’s cessation on June 20.

A report by the New Zealand space agency published on November 7 found that the satellite’s technical failure “occurred in components outside of New Zealand’s control and within the bounds of accepted risk in space missions.” MethaneSAT’s sensor “performed exceptionally well and delivered meaningful science data which New Zealand researchers are using,” the report states.

A different model for satellite development

Easther and others have questioned whether MethaneSAT made the best decisions in the satellite’s development. In a post on LinkedIn, Leigh Foster, former director of space systems at Rocket Lab, accused the project of having failed “to select the right spacecraft manufacturer, and a failure to focus on the right level of technical rigor pre-launch and during [optical alignment, integration and testing].”

Responding to these criticisms, Coifman wrote that the project sought to prove that a non-profit could build and launch a “game-changing instrument using as much off-the-shelf tech as possible,” rather than relying on slow-moving government-run space missions or commercial providers that keep the data private. “MethaneSAT is about transparency,” he wrote. “The data is meant to be open source . . . because we believe that’s the fastest way to turn data into action to protect the climate. The urgency of that purpose means we couldn’t afford the time or money involved in those other approaches.”

Methane emissions are vastly underreported, but they could be slashed quickly

If it had been a conventional NASA-type mission, MethaneSAT would have had “back-ups for the back-ups,” Coifman wrote. But adding those layers of redundancy “would have made it much slower and much more expensive – and totally beyond our reach.”

Even so, MethaneSAT was fully tested before launch according to best practices and protocols, Coifman says.

“The teams at MethaneSAT and Environmental Defense Fund worked with some of the most seasoned professionals in the commercial and government aerospace sectors. We had no reason to doubt their judgement,” Andrew Johnson, deputy head of the New Zealand Space Agency, wrote in a statement to Corporate Knights.

Not a failure

In a blog post earlier this month, Easther excoriated EDF for failing to disclose any results from its investigation into what went wrong with the satellite, writing, “Whatever was learnt has not been shared, a situation that comes as no surprise to those of us who watched this saga play out.”

He’s not alone in seeking clarity. “Even though it appears that New Zealand was not likely involved in the chain of events leading to the underperformance of MethaneSat, we as investors in the project are entitled to an explanation,” Nicholas Rattenbury, another physicist at the University of Auckland, has written in a collection of expert reactions on MethaneSAT’s breakdown for New Zealand’s Science Media Centre.

For its part, EDF rejects the idea that its MethaneSAT project was a failure. “We didn’t accomplish all the things we wanted to, but we’re proud of what we did accomplish,” says Steven Hamburg, EDF’s chief scientist and the project lead for MethaneSAT. The project exceeded expectations in terms of data quality, he says. “We really did push ahead a long way from where others were.”

The high-precision data that MethaneSAT collected in its one year of operation showed what many suspected: that emissions from oil and gas operations are higher than previously estimated or that the industry reports.

The data is also starting to serve its purpose in steering the fossil fuel industry toward methane emission reductions, at least by validating successful regulations. In September, New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham revealed that her state’s methane intensity – a measure of escaped gas – is only 1.2% compared to Texas’s 3.1%, despite much steeper increases in production, and that the captured methane was worth US$125 million in additional natural gas production and $27 million in tax and royalty revenue. The difference is attributed to New Mexico’s stronger methane rules enacted in 2021.

Jon Goldstein, associate vice president for energy transition at EDF, said in a statement that the data obtained by the satellite proves “that cutting methane pollution and waste delivers economic benefits while protecting air quality and our climate.”

Mark Mann is the managing editor at Corporate Knights.

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Methane may have a lower profile than carbon dioxide, but the notoriously underreported greenhouse gas is a key driver of climate change. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), it is responsible for 30% of the rise in global temperatures since the Industrial Revolution. This makes blunting its impact crucial for global climate action.

And yet, as the IEA notes in the latest Global Methane Tracker, key opportunities to curb the potent gas – which has 28 times more heat-trapping power than carbon dioxide – are being squandered. In its annual report, the international agency providing advice and research on the energy transition notes that some 30% of methane emissions from the fossil fuel sector could have been avoided at no net cost because the gas can be captured and sold. And by using existing technology, processes as simple as plugging leaky equipment, fossil fuel methane emissions could be slashed by 70%.

Targeted methane-abatement procedures in the fossil fuel sector alone would prevent roughly a 0.1°C rise in global temperatures by 2050, the IEA says, which is akin to eliminating all the carbon dioxide emissions from heavy industry worldwide. “Methane abatement is a crucial opportunity to reduce near-term global warming at a time when temperatures worldwide have set record highs for two years in a row,” the agency says. 

The amount of methane in the atmosphere is now more than two-and-a-half times greater than pre-industrial levels, the report states. In relative terms, methane levels have been rising more quickly than all other major greenhouse gases. The growth is mainly due to human activities – in particular oil, gas and coal production and agriculture and waste sectors – but evidence also suggests that natural habitats such as wetlands are contributing to atmospheric methane as the warming climate speeds up the breakdown of organic matter.

All told, the fossil fuel sector is responsible for nearly one-third of methane emissions from human activity. Record production means that emissions have remained at around 120 million tonnes annually. Abandoned oil and gas wells and coal mines that were improperly sealed also produce emissions. The planet is littered with as many as eight million abandoned onshore oil and gas wells, half of them in the United States, which also has an estimated 250,000 abandoned coal mines. A recent study in Canada found that methane leaks from decommissioned oil and gas wells is seven times greater than government reports. An even greater source of methane emissions – nearly 18 million tonnes – comes from the incomplete combustion of biomass such as charcoal, wood, agricultural waste and animal dung for cooking and heating in developing economies.

But we can’t know what we don’t measure. And in the case of methane, this is alarmingly clear. “Little or no measurement-based data is used to report methane emissions in most parts of the world,” the IEA says.

The picture is now becoming clearer, however, thanks to more than 25 methane-tracking satellites orbiting the earth. Using this data alongside scientific studies and measurement campaigns, the IEA has been able to piece together estimates of methane emissions that are 80% higher than global reports. The satellites were able to detect a sharp increase in very large methane leaks in oil and gas facilities in 2024.

The gap between reality and disclosure is narrowest in Europe, the IEA says, because countries regularly submit inventories and some producers publish reports. Countries and companies in other regions are moving to improve findings, and Canada was singled out recently for updated methodology that has led to an increase of more than 35% in the volume of “fugitive emissions” identified from oil and gas operations.

Still, significant gaps remain. That’s especially the case in parts of the world where satellites have trouble gathering data, such as Venezuela, which has extensive cloud cover, or Russia, where snow and ice obscure clear views of methane leaks.

“Oil and gas methane emissions can be reduced by around 75% through well-known measures such as LDAR [leak detection and repair] programmes, upgrading leaky and high-emitting equipment or plugging leaky wells,” the IEA notes. “In the coal sector, methane emissions could be halved through effective coal mine methane utilisation in mines, or by deploying flaring or oxidation technologies when energy recovery is not viable. Achieving universal access to clean cooking and modern heating would eliminate the vast majority of emissions from the incomplete combustion of bioenergy.”

The report also touches on the controversial question of natural gas as a transition fuel. Specifically, when compared to coal, natural gas results in 35% fewer greenhouse gas emissions than coal. “Nonetheless, ‘beating’ coal on environmental grounds sets a low bar for natural gas, especially since there are lower-emissions – and often lower-cost – alternatives to both fuels,” it notes. Wind and solar are already cheaper options in many markets.

The post Methane emissions are vastly underreported, but they could be slashed quickly appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Wilson and her crew at advocacy non-profit Oilfield Witness are called “methane hunters” – but she simply points her camera at an oil and gas facility and can see a black cloud on-screen as the instrument picks up hydrocarbons absorbing infrared in real time. “The oil and gas industry says, ‘Look, you can see our site – you can’t see anything,’” she said. “Well, yeah, you can with one of those cameras.”

In recent years, a growing number of non-profit organizations and non-governmental initiatives have turned to advancing technologies to document methane emissions on their own. As methane emissions pose an increasing threat to the climate amid the Trump administration’s regulatory rollbacks and attempts to gut federal emissions tracking, those groups are grappling with what their work will mean in the years to come.

Scientists and government bodies say that reining in methane releases from fossil fuel facilities, which make up about a third of global methane emissions from human activity, is crucial to limiting irreversible climate change. Methane is a powerful climate pollutant – more than 80 times more potent at warming the atmosphere than carbon dioxide over the span of 20 years.

Methane emissions long underestimated

Across the United States, methane is emitted from an ever-expanding web of oil and gas projects, including nearly a million active oil and gas wells, along with pipelines, compressor stations, export facilities, and underground storage and transportation lines. One of the biggest sources is abandoned coalmines and oil and gas wells, according to the latest Global Methane Tracker report from the International Energy Agency (IEA).

Although countries and companies have the tools to reduce methane emissions at low or no cost – and many have pledged to do so – the implementation of mitigation measures is “weak,” and record fossil fuel production has kept those emissions high, the IEA found. The agency further noted that “without targeted action on methane, the risks of severe climate damage increase considerably.”

We have to continue to fight back against the industry’s ongoing propaganda about how they have reduced emissions.

– Sharon Wilson, methane hunter, Oilfield Witness

Part of the problem is that methane emissions have long gone undercounted: oil and gas companies may be emitting up to three times the amount of methane estimated in records they provide to federal regulators. Under the Trump administration, those companies could be exempt from having to provide any records at all.

The Environmental Protection Agency is planning to get rid of most reporting requirements under the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program, which once obtained publicly available data from thousands of polluting facilities across the country. For the first time in nearly three decades, the EPA did not publish its mandatory annual report on national greenhouse gas emissions this year.

Independent methane trackers step up

Now, some of the third parties tracking methane emissions are optimistic that they are well primed to help fill in those gaps and work with companies to change their ways. Other watchdogs are expressing alarm over the implications of evaporating federal standards and oversight, which some say were already inadequate to manage pollution from increasing fossil fuel projects.

As the EPA stops tracking greenhouse gas emissions, state and local regulators may have no choice but to turn to independent emissions databases for information. One example is Climate Trace, a global non-profit coalition that uses satellites and other remote sensing technologies to provide an emissions inventory for states, municipalities, sectors and corporations worldwide. “Climate Trace is increasingly going to be able to continue to provide emissions estimates for every facility in America if other data sources shut down,” said Gavin McCormick, one of the coalition’s founders.

McCormick said his group works with big tech and car companies looking to reduce emissions in their supply chains, and anticipated more interest in his database from private companies across polluting sectors. “There are more and more emissions-reducing opportunities that are actually really good business,” he said, adding that methane leaks in particular are an easy fix. “The ongoing increase in oil and gas has a very different carbon footprint depending on what we do with methane.”

Advanced techniques create new pressure

The technology for pollution tracking is more sophisticated than ever, with new satellite programs like the Environmental Defense Fund’s (EDF) MethaneSAT and Carbon Mapper able to measure methane emissions and leaks from wide regions and specific infrastructure across the globe. At the Society of Environmental Journalists conference in April, scientists from EDF and Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) spoke to reporters about the advancing ability of those satellites to document companies’ changing methane emissions over time.

“In order to address methane emissions we needed to understand where those emissions were and how much those emissions were, and we had no data – nobody had data,” said Steve Hamburg, the lead scientist for MethaneSAT at EDF. With satellites tracking methane pollution, he explained, “we don’t have to take anyone’s word for it; we can independently validate it. Every major company knows that’s going to be happening whether they want it or not, around the world.”

Deborah Gordon, senior principal in RMI’s Climate Intelligence Program, who began her career at Chevron, said she believed that better methane tracking would lead oil and gas companies to fix their leaks. “Gas is a commodity,” she said. “They don’t want to leak the product that they can sell. There’s real value in these companies understanding what they’re losing and burning up in smoke, and also reputational risk.”

Skepticism that the oil and gas industry will respond

Other groups in the methane-tracking space are more skeptical that documenting emissions alone could lead the fossil fuel industry to adequately police itself. “[Satellite] data is sold to the industry,” Wilson, of Oilfield Witness, wrote in a blog post. “So if they were going to stop methane by using satellite data, methane levels would be going down right now, as the industry has access to the best data available. Unless we stop drilling new holes, satellites are just another delay tactic.”

The companies are “not necessarily bound to social responsibility, and never were,” said Josh Eisenfeld, oil and gas research and accountability manager at Earthworks, a non-profit group that advocates for communities affected by fossil fuel pollution.

Like Oilfield Witness, Earthworks uses optical-gas-imaging cameras to capture methane emissions and other toxic pollutants at oil and gas facilities across the country, then uses its data to submit complaints to the relevant regulatory authority. According to Eisenfeld, state regulators often have limited resources to monitor the complex web of polluting fossil fuel infrastructure in so many communities. On-the-ground monitoring can help them precisely detect a faulty point at a facility where methane is leaking. “We like to think we’re helping them be more efficient,” he said.

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While Earthworks is working to alert state regulators, the group is limited in what it can do without cooperative federal oversight. The Trump administration is undoing Biden’s federal fee on methane emissions and requirements for addressing leaks and phasing out routine flaring, which would have created uniform, stricter standards across the country. “The same companies that said they supported methane rules that were introduced by the Biden administration are now silent as these rules are rolled back and as their requirements to report how much they pollute are nixed,” Eisenfeld said.

The American Petroleum Institute, meanwhile, has reversed its earlier support for the rule – calling it a “punitive tax on American energy production that stifles innovation” after it was repealed by a newly Republican-controlled Congress in February.

More than half of the hundred largest onshore oil and gas producers in the United States have no public commitments to reducing methane pollution, while others have quietly delayed or rescinded those commitments, according to a recently updated database by Earthworks and the advocacy non-profit Gas Leaks. Exxon, for instance, dropped references to absolute methane emission reductions in its latest corporate reporting after claiming two years earlier that it planned to achieve an “absolute reduction in methane emissions by 70%” by 2030. “Even the commitments that they claimed in the past had no real legal requirements attached to them,” said Eisenfeld.

Certification projects seek to incentivize leak reductions

The gap in federal oversight could also be filled by third-party monitoring initiatives with very different motivations from those watchdogs. Oil and gas companies are now working with firms to monitor and “certify” their gas as low on methane emissions, allowing it to be sold by gas utilities at a premium. But their methodologies – which can include continuous-emission-monitoring systems – can vary vastly in effectiveness, depending on connectivity issues and the number and placement of monitors a firm chooses to use on site.

One of those firms is Project Canary, a leading gas certification company whose CEO has stated that “we are going to be able to solve climate change with measurement.” The company sells its own continuous-emission-monitoring systems to the companies it certifies.

According to two reports published by Earthworks and environmental advocacy non-profit Oil Change International, Project Canary’s monitors in Colorado regularly missed methane pollution events from oil and gas operations because of their placement and their tendency to be offline. Project Canary claimed it was not certifying the sites referenced in the reports. Earthworks stands by its findings, and says it is still awaiting data from Project Canary to support that claim. Earthworks also says its report appeared to prompt revisions to air quality rules in the state.

Another gas certification initiative launched in partnership between RMI and developer Systemiq, MiQ, aims to create “a financial incentive” for producers to reduce their methane pollution by generating different price levels for oil and gas based on adherence to MiQ’s standard of methane emissions management. “The future must be powered by 100% clean energy. MiQ’s mission is to reduce the climate impact of methane emissions from the oil and gas sector until we get there,” said Georges Tijbosch, MiQ’s senior adviser, at the time of its launch.

Declining pressure on the oil and gas industry

Even if methane emissions from the oil and gas sector were drastically reduced – they can’t be eliminated entirely, as methane is the primary component in so-called natural gas – the extraction and burning of fossil fuels creates a host of other public health and environmental hazards. Just this week, a new analysis found that Colorado oil and gas companies have secretly pumped at least 30 million pounds of chemicals into the ground over the past 18 months.

At the moment, there is a decline in pressure on the industry to curb its climate pollution in the United States. The European Union is exploring loopholes for U.S. gas exports to comply with its methane emissions standards in order to avoid trade disputes with Trump. The U.S. Interior Department is planning to fast-track oil-and-gas project permitting procedures that could take multiple years to a maximum of 28 days. Even before the change in administration, oil companies headquartered in and outside the United States were “retiring” their climate commitments while ramping up fossil fuel production.

Eisenfeld warned that while “we need all of the tools in the toolbox to combat climate change, we also need to be honest about what each of those tools can do. Voluntary efforts by the fossil fuel industry, no matter what third party creates them, will always be limited by what the industry is willing to do voluntarily.”

Wilson, a fifth-generation Texan, worked an office job as a contractor with major oil and gas operators for more than a decade before she quit and moved to Wise County, the birthplace of fracking. She began submitting open records requests to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) – and eventually bought her own optical-gas-imaging camera to document the pollution coming from oil and gas wells next to homes and schools. Wilson has faced ire from the industry after speaking out on her blog against the impacts of fracking – in one case, hundreds of her private emails were subpoenaed by oil and gas company Range Resources in a high-profile defamation lawsuit against a Texas couple who accused the company of polluting their groundwater.

“I’ve been sitting on the side of the road watching oil and gas make big messes for almost 30 years,” Wilson said. “We have to continue to fight back against the industry’s ongoing propaganda about how they have reduced emissions.”

Wilson estimates having made nearly 500 complaints to the TCEQ, using the footage from her cameras as evidence. But the agency largely stopped responding to her requests, she said, even before the change in administration. The state doesn’t have a specific rule targeting methane releases from oil and gas infrastructure and sued the Biden administration for its methane rule when it was first published.

By documenting invisible pollution, Wilson hopes to expose what she sees as the biggest impediment to action: the industry’s deceit about the harm its operations cause. “I think that most people, if their lover lied to them at this level, their clothes would be out in the front yard on fire, and I think that that’s where we need to get with the American public – they need to break up with the oil and gas industry,” she said. “The best way for them to be empowered to do that is to understand the extent of lying and to actually see the pollution they are breathing, and it’s everywhere.”

This article by ExxonKnews is published here as part of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now. It has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style. You can read the original here. 

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The study from environmental non-profits Changing Markets Foundation and Mighty Earth analyzed the climate plans of the United States’ and Europe’s top-grossing supermarkets, including the United Kingdom’s Tesco and Sainsbury’s, U.S. retail giant Walmart and German chains Lidl and Asda.

The meat and dairy sector is responsible for around a third of atmospheric methane and accounts for a third of all supermarket emissions. Scientists say the highly potent greenhouse gas – 80 times more powerful than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period – must be slashed by 40% to 45% by 2030 to meet climate goals.

Despite this urgency, Thursday’s analysis identified an overwhelming lack of action to tackle the powerful climate-heating gas. None of the retailers analyzed had a target in place to reduce methane, or to report on how much of the greenhouse gas they are responsible for through the products they sell.

Only five of the supermarkets surveyed had plans to boost sales of plant-based proteins, despite eating less meat and dairy being a key recommendation of climate scientists who say it’s crucial to meeting climate goals. And just six had concrete plans to reduce their overall supply chain emissions.

The report calls on all the retailers to set an ambitious target for reducing methane by at least 30% by 2030, echoing the aims of the Global Methane Pledge, a voluntary framework led by the European Union and the United States, and agreed by world leaders in 2021.

Maddy Haughton-Boakes, senior campaigner at the Changing Markets Foundation, said methane emissions were a “major blindspot” for supermarkets. “Cutting methane this decade is our emergency brake on runaway global heating, yet retailers are barely pressing it,” she said.

‘No real leaders’

The report looked at top-performing supermarkets in the United States and Europe – based on their yearly revenue, volume of grocery sales and dominance in the meat and dairy retail market.

These supermarket chains were then assessed on their ability to tackle methane against 18 indicators, including on set targets, reported emissions, and plans to scale up plant-based alternatives to animal-sourced food. Not one of the 20 retailers had plans to reduce – or even report on – their methane emissions.

The highest-scoring retailer – Tesco – scored 51 out of 100 in the assessment. Germany’s Schwarz Group – the world’s fourth-largest retailer – was in second place with just 35 points. The average score across all indicators among retailers was 20 out of a possible 100 – a rating the authors said indicated a “dismal lack of action and major room for improvement.”

Two supermarkets – the U.S chain Albertsons and Spain’s Mercadona – scored no points at all. All the U.S “big four” supermarkets – including retail titan Walmart and Albertsons, as well as Costco and Kroger – were in the bottom half.

The lack of reporting and target-setting puts retailers behind other companies in their methane ambitions.

European dairy giant Danone set a precedent for large food firms for introducing a methane-reduction goal in 2023. Other dairy companies, including French multinational cheese marketer Bel Group and the U.S subsidiary of French dairy company Lactalis, are also now reporting on their emissions.

Gemma Hoskins, global methane lead at Mighty Earth, accused supermarkets of “ignoring the methane problem in their meat and dairy aisles.”

“Retailers are uniquely positioned to urgently drive down agricultural methane emissions in their supply chains,” she said. “That starts with being honest about the impact of the products they sell and working harder and faster to reduce that impact.”

More action needed 

The report identifies an apparent “disconnect” between retailers’ ambitious climate promises and action. Nearly half (nine) of the retailers analyzed had set net-zero targets. This included the U.K.’s Tesco, which has said it aims to meet net-zero emissions across its supply chain by 2050.

Eleven supermarket chains acknowledged that emissions from animal agriculture significantly drive climate change, and several – including Casino and Tesco – suggested that increasing sales of plant-based foods could help reduce climate impacts.

However, these pledges were not accompanied by real-world actions to reduce emissions. Only six retailers had set targets to reduce Scope 3 emissions as part of their climate commitments. This category of emissions – which includes the transport, production and distribution of food – make up an estimated 93% of supermarkets’ overall climate footprints.

The report called on supermarkets to ensure that net-zero targets were accompanied by real reductions in Scope 3 emissions. Retailers should introduce a “comprehensive plan” on how to reduce emissions from across their value chains, the report argued, including time-bound near- and long-term targets for reductions in greenhouse gases.

“Given the sheer scale of meat and dairy emissions, retailers cannot credibly meet their net zero targets without tackling methane,” Hoskins of Mighty Earth told DeSmog. “Increasing plant-based products and reducing methane emissions from meat and dairy must be a core strategy for every supermarket.”

Plant-based transition 

Most retailers had no plans to increase sales of plant-based products, the report found.

Just five of the retailers surveyed – Tesco, Asda, Carrefour, Schwarz Group and Dutch supermarket group Ahold Delhaize – have set measurable targets for increasing alternative-protein sales globally. This is despite the world’s leading climate science body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), calling for wealthier consumers to transition to more plant-based diets to tackle harmful greenhouse gas emissions.

In a 2024 analysis, the non-profit Madre Brava and the consultancy firm Profundo found that a 50% shift to plant-based proteins by six leading food retailers alone could also save emissions equivalent to removing 25 million petrol and diesel cars from the EU.

A shift to plant-based proteins also has considerable health benefits. Scientific assessments have shown that Europeans eat twice as much meat as is recommended by the “healthy diet basket” – a metric used by the United Nations as a benchmark for ideal nutritional intake.

In a landmark report last year, the UN’s World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that diets high in processed meats – which are linked to cancer, heart diseases and other non-communicable diseases – are responsible for 117,290 deaths across Europe.

A study published in December found that even processed plant-based products – such as veggie burgers – still offer substantial environmental, health and nutritional benefits compared to animal products, though these are even greater for unprocessed alternative proteins.

Changing Markets and Mighty Earth argued that supermarkets should take heed of the recommendations of the EAT-Lancet, a major 2019 scientific commission into climate-friendly diets, and aim to sell 60% plant-based protein products versus 40% animal-based proteins by 2030.

Food retailers should roll out attractive own-brand plant-based ranges across their stores, the authors recommended, and shift marketing and storefront efforts to promote healthy alternative proteins such as legumes and tofu over animal-based foods.

The article was first published by DeSmog. It has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style. Read the original article here.

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The online reaction was swift, with stats, charts, links and memes filling replies from all sides. While overwhelming scientific findings consider agriculture, particularly livestock farming, a significant source of planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions, conflicting measurements, marketing and misinformation have been making the facts more difficult to decipher. And it appears the meat industry has been capitalizing on all the confusion.

Ever since the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) first dropped a bombshell report on the “enormous” ecological impact of livestock farming back in 2006, the trillion-dollar global meat industry has been on the defensive. The report concluded that cars and coal plants weren’t the only ones spewing out planet-warming greenhouse gases: cattle-rearing was also a top contributor to the climate crisis. The backlash was intense, with FAO staffers recently revealing that pressure from Big Ag led to their work being censored and undermined. 

Two decades later, the meat and dairy industries have spent millions on counter-research and marketing, including creating an “MBA” for beef industry advocates. The world’s biggest meat-packers have announced net-zero targets, as the industry tries to reassure the public that despite the urgency of the climate emergency, there’s no need to cut back on our burgers and steaks. Even beef can be part of a balanced planet-friendly diet, they claim. 

In one of the latest attempts to quell consumer demand for more sustainable protein, Tyson Foods, America’s largest beef exporter, launched a “climate-friendly” product line, Brazen Beef, under the slogan “Better beef, better planet.” With the help of US$61 million in grants from the US Department of Agriculture, cattle are enrolled in Tyson Foods’ “Climate-Smart Beef Program,” according to the product website, “for emission reduction from pasture to production.” As Tyson’s VP of fresh meats marketing told Progressive Grocer magazine, “We are trying to be upbeat and different, with something that speaks definitively to [millennial and Gen Z consumers].”

And Tyson isn’t the only one banking on planet-friendly meat to keep consumers coming back to the butcher. Walmart Canada stocks 2.5 million pounds of beef patties certified by the Canadian Roundtable for Sustainable Beef. Nestlé is paying ranchers for regenerative grazing practices that get sold as carbon credits. General Mills makes a regenerative-beef protein bar that it claims offsets 80% of its greenhouse gas emissions through regenerating soil practices.”

The practice of branding meat as climate-friendly isn’t new. Many of Canadian meat giant Maple Leaf Foods’ products have carried a “carbon zero” label since 2019, when it declared itself to be the “world’s first major carbon neutral food company.” Its Greenfield Natural Meat pork products are cleverly marketed as part of a “low carb(on) diet,” including “planet-based” bacon.

But while these multinationals have made apparent efforts to reduce their environmental impact – from limiting deforestation in their tropical supply chains to retrofitting plants with LED lighting, and even restoring a few thousand acres of grasslands – there is no indication they have reduced production of the products at the heart of the climate quagmire. And as emissions from the world’s 20 largest publicly listed meat and dairy companies keep ticking upwards while global meat consumption swells, some major meat producers and retailers are playing with the metrics that measure them – and lobbying governments to help them make climate-friendly claims that have the appearance of adding up. 

Skewering the stats 

In the air-conditioned corridors of Dubai’s COP28 climate summit in December, a record-breaking number of meat and dairy delegates descended to soft-sell a new way of measuring their sector’s contribution to the climate crisis. The livestock industry is responsible for nearly a third of heat-trapping methane (the world’s second-biggest driver of climate change). To date, the UN and global governments have been measuring “global warming potential” (GWP) over a 100-year time frame using a metric called GWP100. Since methane breaks down in the atmosphere much sooner than carbon dioxide, which will warm the planet for centuries, an additional metric known as GWP* was proposed by Oxford University scientists in 2016 that factors in methane’s potent short-term impacts, taking 2016 methane emissions as baseline. With one caveat: it was never intended to be used as the sole way to measure animal emissions. But the meat and dairy industry is eating it up. 

“Imagine a house is on fire, and someone is actively pouring gas on the fire. They then pour a little less gas and want credit for doing so, despite still feeding the fire. Perhaps they claim they are now ‘fire neutral,’” writes University of California, Davis, researcher Caspar Donnison, co-author of a study published in Environmental Research Letters in December on the use of GWP* in climate-neutral livestock research. “That is more or less what some influential supporters of the livestock industry have done.”

A report by Changing Markets, a U.K.-based foundation, found that, using 2021 as the baseline, Tyson could “use GWP* to claim that a 30% reduction in emissions by 2030 means it is removing 82.6 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent from the atmosphere a year, yet calculations using GWP100 suggest it would still be emitting 58.5 million tonnes annually – similar to the annual emissions of Peru.”

Nusa Urbancic, director of the Changing Markets Foundation, said that using 2021 as the baseline means “GWP* will penalise poor countries that are expanding livestock production from a low base while rewarding the world’s biggest industrial livestock producers with millions of heads of cattle.” 

In the case of Tyson’s Brazen Beef, the metrics have yet to be made public. How Tyson got to the claim of “the first climate friendly beef with 10% greenhouse gas reduction” – becoming the first meat company to use the USDA-backed climate-friendly label – remains unclear. “In order to claim a 10% reduction, you need to establish scientifically a baseline that everyone agrees is the common amount that beef produces,” New York University environmental scientist Matthew Hayek explains. “There doesn’t seem to be any data that the company itself, or the government who it created that certification in conjunction with, is able to provide.” 

Corporate Knights reached out to the USDA and Brazen’s certifier, Where Food Comes From, but reps directed us back to Brazen Beef to elaborate “if they choose.” Tyson Foods did not respond. 

Either way, Brazen has critics raising the question: should a burger that still generates 90% of the emissions of a regular burger be allowed to call itself climate-friendly? 

Regenerative reset

In the face of mounting pressure to get a handle on food systems’ enormous emissions, Big Ag, Big Food and Big Meat have all been leaning into climate-smart agriculture, aka regenerative agriculture or carbon farming, to save the day. Big Meat, in particular, has a hefty amount of emissions to draw down, and they’re hoping to sequester as much as they can into the soil, particularly the rich soil under ranch grasslands. Whether it’s Burger King investing in grassland projects or Maple Leaf, Nestlé and Brazil’s JBS (the world’s biggest meat-packer) buying carbon offsets from farmers that are paid to shift to regenerative practices, bucolic images of animals grazing in the open air are being used to lull conscious consumers into believing that buying meat can be beneficial for the planet.

But quantifying just how much carbon is drawn into the soil when every company uses different definitions of “regenerative” has been messy and the subject of heated debate, with some meat advocates claiming that grass-fed beef, in particular, has little to no effect on climate change. 

Then scientists in the Netherlands, the U.K. and Sweden began looking into it. In a mic-dropping study released in November, the researchers concluded that there is no plausible way for the global livestock industry to ever sequester enough carbon to offset its planet-warming emissions. In order to counter annual methane emissions from ruminants such as cattle, the authors explain, 135 gigatonnes (billion tonnes) of carbon would have to be returned to soils – a colossal challenge, equivalent to all the carbon lost as a result of agriculture over the last 12,000 years. Their conclusion: “The claim that ruminant systems can have a negative annual GHG balance via soil C-sequestration is overly optimistic and could be misleading.” 

Don’t have a cow offset

Grasslands aside, for most meat and dairy companies, claiming carbon neutrality and getting to net-zero is still largely a matter of basic omission. To call itself carbon neutral, including its Greenfield Natural Meat line, Maple Leaf (which does not sell beef) says it “eliminated, reduced and neutralized” its Scope 1, 2 and a portion of Scope 3 greenhouse gas emissions. The problem is that Scope 3 emissions (those from raw materials, feed and ingredients it buys and emissions associated with packaging and distribution) account for about 88% of Maple Leaf’s total emissions, according to the company. That includes emissions from animals and meat purchased from suppliers. “In 2023, we purchased carbon offset credits from 16 projects that neutralized approximately 7% of our Scope 3 emissions,” Maple Leaf spokespeople tell Corporate Knights – specifically for products that carry the “carbon zero” marketing label. As NYU’s Hayek points out, the Scope 3 emissions that Maple Leaf doesn’t include are “the largest slice of their supply chain.”

According to a report by the Freedom Food Alliance (FFA) released this winter, Maple Leaf isn’t alone. “Over 90% of most major meat and dairy companies’ emissions – representing Scope 3 third party supply chain emissions – are mostly omitted from their climate goals.” That includes those of meatpacking giant JBS, who, according to the report, “continues to make ‘net zero by 2040’ statements despite the National Advertising Review Board advising to discontinue this misleading claim,” along with marketing phrases like “Bacon, chicken wings and steak with net zero emissions. It’s possible.” In February, New York Attorney General Letitia James sued JBS, alleging that the company made deceptive statements in presentations, ads and on its website regarding its climate commitments. JBS denied the allegations.

The smoke and mirrors use of “net-zero” is just one of the tactics Big Meat uses to “deny, derail, delay, deflect and distract” meaningful discussion, as the FFA lays out. Meanwhile, the meat industry’s efforts have been focused not only on boosting their own products, but also on turning consumers away from plant-based meat alternatives. During the pandemic, brands like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods surged in popularity. Touted as more sustainable and ethical, their sales soared. But by 2022 the narrative had shifted. Skepticism grew as critiques around the “ultra-processed” ingredients in plant-based options gained traction. 

Full-page ads were taken out in major newspapers by a PR company working for the meat industry, which also ran Super Bowl spots in select markets, all to turn people off foreign-sounding ingredients in “synthetic” meat. The tactics used to dissuade consumers from turning to alternatives worked to complement the meat industry’s move to market its products as climate-friendly. 

Rhetoric and marketing play a major role in the rebranding of meat as climate-friendly, explains Jason Hannan, editor of the book Meatsplaining: The Animal Agriculture Industry and the Rhetoric of Denial. “One of the most important contributions of environmental scientists and activists has been to introduce critical terms like ‘global warming,’ ‘climate change,’ ‘sustainability,’ ‘tipping points’ and ‘net-zero’ into our public vocabulary,” he says. “These terms have shaped how we assess governments and industries for their responsibility in our environmental and climate crises.” He notes that “carbon-neutral meat” has become a key term that the industry has appropriated to provide the veneer of environmental responsibility: “It’s like painting a gas station green and claiming it’s environmentally friendly.”

Over in Europe, lawmakers voted in January to outlaw the use of terms such as “climate neutral” for products that use carbon offsets, like, say, Maple Leaf’s bacon (which is not available in Europe). A few weeks later, the European Commission recommended ambitious new greenhouse gas emissions cuts. It had, however, quietly dropped a call for agriculture to curb non-CO2 emissions by at least 30%, compared to 2015, by 2040. All references to livestock farming, methane and a recommendation that Europeans eat less meat had also been taken off the table as a concession to protesting farmers. 

It’s another indication that the meat industry has turned climate change into red-meat politics.

Adria Vasil is the managing editor of Corporate Knights. 

Jessica Scott-Reid writes about animal welfare and plant-based food. 

This story is part of our Spring 2024 Plant Power package.

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The 120 million tonnes of emissions from fossil fuels, plus another 10 megatonnes from traditional uses of biomass, leave countries with a lot of work to do in very little time if they aim to drastically reduce their methane pollution by 2030. That’s after 50 of the world’s biggest fossil producers, including 29 oil and gas companies, pledged to essentially phase out methane emissions and end routine gas flaring by decade’s end in the early days of the COP28 climate summit in December.

“A 75% cut in methane emissions from fossil fuels by 2030 is imperative to stop the planet from warming to a dangerous level,” IEA executive director Fatih Birol said in a release.

The report says that new national pledges on methane would reduce emissions by about 50%. “However, in most cases, these pledges are not yet backed up by detailed plans, policies, and regulations.”

Methane is a shorter-lived greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, but it carries about 84 times more warming potential over the crucial 20-year span when humanity will be scrambling to get climate change under control. The IEA says methane is responsible for about 30% of the rise in global temperatures since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and the top 10 polluters – all of them major oil and gas producers – accounted for 80 million tonnes in 2023, or two-thirds of the global total.

The biggest emitters were:

• United States, 13.3 megatonnes

• Russia, 11.2 Mt

• Iran, 6.0 Mt

• Turkmenistan, 5.2 Mt

• Venezuela, 3.0 Mt

• China, 3.0 Mt, with less than one-sixth the emissions intensity of Venezuela

• Algeria, 2.8 Mt

• Saudi Arabia, 2.4 Mt

• Canada, 2.4 Mt, with slightly higher emissions intensity than Saudi Arabia

• Iraq, 2.3 Mt

• Norway, which is listed on the IEA chart but with no emissions data

Oil was the biggest source of methane emissions in 2023, at 52 megatonnes, followed by gas at 27 megatonnes and coal at 37.

The IEA says that countries’ commitments on methane in 2023 put them in a position to begin reducing emissions soon, although those promises still fall short of what’s needed to hold average global warming to the Paris Agreement target of 1.5°C.

“I am encouraged by the momentum we’ve seen in recent months, which our analysis shows could make an enormous and immediate difference in the world’s fight against climate change,” Birol said in the release. “Now, we must focus on transforming commitments into action – while continuing to aim higher,” with “well-known policies and existing technologies” on tap to “reduce methane emissions from fossil fuels substantially.”

That means the coming years could bring considerable progress or far less.

“On one hand, more governments and fossil fuel companies have committed to take action on methane,” the IEA writes. “Global efforts to report emissions estimates consistently and transparently are strengthening, and studies suggest emissions are falling in some regions.”

However, “overall emissions remain far too high to meet the world’s climate goals,” the Paris-based agency warns. “Large methane emissions events detected by satellites also rose by more than 50% in 2023 compared with 2022, with more than 5 Mt of methane emissions detected from major fossil fuel leaks around the world – including a major well blowout in Kazakhstan that went on for more than 200 days.”

This story first appeared in The Energy Mix. Read the original article here.

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Yet if we achieve these dramatic reductions, it won’t necessarily mean that every company has reduced its methane emissions by 75%. Some companies are likely to perform better than others. The need to distinguish leaders from stragglers means accurate and transparent emissions reporting is essential.

With climate disclosure rules from Canadian Securities Administrators expected in the first half of 2024, there is hope for improved corporate transparency and accountability on environmental, social and governance (ESG) standards. But a gaping loophole in the proposed standard will mean that investors won’t get accurate information about Canadian oil and gas companies’ emissions, particularly when it comes to methane.

Barriers to informed investing

Since reducing methane emissions is a quick and cost-effective way to curb emissions and mitigate warming, investors will want companies to move especially fast on this potent GHG. Right now, if you want to base investment decisions on methane performance, the information you need is strewn across various sources, including the federal government’s Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program, Petrinex, provincial reporting programs such as Alberta’s OneStop, and producer websites. Some of that data is publicly accessible and some not. What is accessible is sometimes contradictory, often incomparable and consistently inaccurate.

It shouldn’t be this hard for investors to find the facts.

An end to the “Wild West”

The International Sustainability Standards Board’s (ISSB) reporting standards are designed to establish a “global baseline” for sustainability reporting and require that companies disclose climate-related governance, strategy, risk management, and metrics and targets. They should help end what has been described as the “Wild West” of sustainability reporting, where voluntary reporting enables companies to “cherry-pick” favourable ESG frameworks from more than 600 choices. Greater standardization will make the information available to investors more consistent, comparable and meaningful.

While the ISSB rules establish a baseline for international reporting requirements, it is up to national regulators – like Canada’s CSA – to determine legally binding requirements in their jurisdictions. The CSA’s proposed National Instrument 51-107 – Disclosure of Climate-Related Matters sets forth the rules for disclosure that will apply to all publicly traded Canadian companies.

Out of step with global standards

While a growing number of companies are disclosing environmental data, the majority still don’t, including 1,600 of the most environmentally harmful companies in the world, such as ExxonMobil, Chevron and Glencore. A study by researchers at St. Francis Xavier University found that, of 70 Canadian oil and gas producers surveyed, only 49% had sustainability reports or ESG indicators posted on their websites – and only 32% reported methane intensity.

The proposed CSA rules don’t actually get rid of voluntary reporting – at least not where it counts. They require publicly traded oil and gas companies to disclose Scope 1 (direct), Scope 2 (indirect, from energy purchased for production) and Scope 3 (indirect, from downstream consumption) emissions . . . unless they choose not to.

The proposed rules include a permissive opt-out clause, which allows companies not to report, so long as they provide a reason. The text does not require that the reason be legitimate or define “legitimate reason.” Moreover, the text recognizes that this flexibility renders the GHG reporting requirement “not mandatory.” The choice to opt out of reporting takes the Canadian rules, in the words of one legal expert, “wildly out of step” with U.S. and international requirements.

The CSA indicates that it is consulting on an “alternative” rule that would require Scope 1 reporting while keeping the “report or explain” requirement for Scope 2 and 3 emissions. This would be preferable for the purposes of corporate transparency and accountability – but even still, large emitters should not be able to opt out of any aspect of emissions reporting.

Accuracy

Then there’s the thorny issue of inaccurate methane quantification. The official federal inventory and ESG metrics alike are based on estimation and self-reporting, which are known to under-represent emissions. The StFX study shows that modelling methane intensity based on field data results in an intensity rate that is more than twice that of the official methane inventory.

The new Canadian disclosure rules do nothing to address the underestimation problem. They specify that companies that choose to report should follow the GHG Protocol (or a comparable method), which involves status quo accounting using emissions factors, with no integration of measurement and verification.

Stronger requirements needed

Canadian investors deserve clear, accessible, comprehensive and accurate data regarding oil and gas methane and other GHG emissions. In Canada, that can become a reality only if:

1. The CSA aligns with international standards by eliminating the permissive opt-out clause for emissions of all scopes.
2. Oil and gas companies are required to adhere to international best practices for measurement, monitoring, reporting and verification, such as the Oil and Gas Methane Partnership 2.0 backed by credible and transparent measurement standards, such as GTI Veritas or MiQ.

Lax emission-reporting standards mean Canadians don’t have the information they need to judge companies’ environmental performance, make informed investment decisions and hold heavy emitters accountable.

Amanda Bryant is a policy analyst working to advocate for strong regulations to effectively reduce methane emissions from oil and gas activity.

The post Proposed climate disclosure rules have a gaping loophole for methane emissions appeared first on Corporate Knights.

On one stretch of the Douglas Channel shoreline is the site of LNG Canada, a partnership of international corporations including Shell PLC and PetroChina. The LNG Canada project currently under construction and the TC Energy pipeline that will supply it with gas were jointly billed as the largest private-sector investment in Canadian history – made possible with $5.4 billion in subsidies from British Columbia and $275 million in support from Ottawa.

Further along the shore is the planned home of Cedar LNG, a smaller yet-to-be-green-lit project that is majority owned by the Haisla with a minority stake held by Calgary-based Pembina Pipeline Corp. Privately owned Woodfibre LNG is also under construction at Squamish.

All told, 24 would-be LNG developers have received natural-gas export permits from the federal energy regulator, though many of those will not proceed. Canada is well behind competitors like the United States and Australia in the race to supply a fossil fuel market that has limited growth prospects over the medium term. Advocates of Canadian LNG exports say that sending gas to Asian markets will help them reduce reliance on coal, and thereby decrease global carbon emissions.

It is a much-disputed argument. Several recent studies challenge the industry position. Researchers suggest that the leakage of methane throughout the LNG life cycle can eliminate any greenhouse-gas (GHG) advantage gas has over coal at the point of final combustion. And some question whether growing reliance on LNG could slow the deployment of less carbon-intensive alternatives.

Still, producers want the federal government to include exported LNG as part of its climate change strategy, including policies for preferential financing. Ottawa is currently developing a transition taxonomy – essentially a guideline as to which types of investments are appropriate in the transition to a net-zero economy. In a report last March, the federally appointed Sustainable Finance Action Council (SFAC) said that only projects that are aligned with a net-zero pathway should be included in the taxonomy, without clarifying whether natural gas falls into that group. The government now faces a concerted lobbying effort to green-light expanded LNG capacity. Sources tell Corporate Knights that the minister’s office has delayed commenting on SFAC’s recommendations because of concerns over LNG.

West Coast dreams of LNG-fuelled prosperity rest on a shaky foundation of questionable assumptions.

Methane leakage

Numerous recent studies suggest that a major expansion of LNG exports from Canada would contribute to the growing climate crisis, rather than mitigate it as proponents claim. Both the International Energy Agency (IEA) and the United Nations Environment Programme warned this past fall against expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure that could lock in carbon emissions for decades.

Cornell University ecosystem scientist Robert Howarth recently concluded that LNG exported from the U.S. to Asia or Europe has higher carbon intensity than local coal use due to the leakage of methane – a powerful warming agent – throughout the LNG supply chain, but particularly during shipping. To address the urgency of the climate crisis, the world must “move away from any use of LNG as a fuel as quickly as possible, and immediately stop construction of any new LNG infrastructure,” Howarth wrote in a paper released in November. He’s been an outspoken critic of natural gas for more than a decade, facing years of harassment for his stance. But he’s not alone in his critiques. Researchers at RMI – the Rocky Mountain Institute – published a paper last July in which they concluded that methane leakage rates as low as 0.2% can eliminate any carbon advantage natural gas would have over coal-fired energy. 

Hundreds of studies using an array of measurement techniques have concluded that the industry’s methane emissions are often wildly underestimated. Methane can leak from a number of points in the natural gas cycle, from extraction and processing to transportation and power generation facilities – and there are no reliable government systems in place to comprehensively track the leaks. 

Globally, the IEA has estimated that methane emissions are 70% higher than industry reports. Carleton University’s Energy and Emissions Research Lab recently completed a census of methane emissions from upstream oil and gas production. Led by engineering professor Matthew Johnson, the researchers measured emissions at 3,500 oil and gas facilities and 5,600 wells. As Carleton reported, “Johnson and his team discovered that the actual quantity of methane produced by Canada’s oil and gas sector in the provinces of British Columbia, Saskatchewan and Alberta is consistently far higher than what was previously reported.” Alberta’s facilities, in particular, were found to be underreporting by nearly 50%.

At the COP28 climate summit in early December, the federal government announced new draft regulations that it says would result in a 75% reduction in methane emissions in the oil and gas sector from 2012 levels by 2030 while acknowledging that further work is required to accurately quantify methane emissions. Slashing methane emissions – along with better tracking – would help Canadian gas producers make the environmental case versus coal. However, natural gas still produces CO2 emissions and expanding supply and demand is inconsistent with net-zero plans. 

A paper co-authored by University of Calgary professor Sara Hastings-Simon suggests that newly built natural gas assets would become white elephants if the world succeeds in reducing its demand for fossil fuels as governments have pledged to do. At the same time, growing LNG imports in Asia could slow the adoption of lower-carbon alternatives, including renewable energy, the researchers concluded.

LNG at best represents a short-term opportunity, Hastings-Simon and her colleagues say. By the 2030s, the costly new LNG export terminals will either become stranded assets or lock in emission growth that takes us in the wrong direction on climate change.

In a special report released ahead of the United Nations climate summit in November, the IEA forecast that global demand for natural gas will peak by 2030 and could decline precipitously over the following two decades if countries rise to the challenge of global warming. The Paris-based agency – which advises wealthy countries on energy policy – urged against a major expansion of any fossil fuel infrastructure, noting that the world would need to reduce natural gas demand by 20% by 2030 and 75% by 2050 if we’re to limit warming to 1.5°C. “The ‘Golden Age of Gas,’ a term coined by the IEA in 2011, is nearing an end,” said the IEA report.

“Successful clean energy transitions require much lower demand for oil and gas, which means scaling back oil and gas operations over time – not expanding them,” Fatih Birol, the agency’s executive director, says in the report. Rapid expansion in LNG supply over the past 10 years will be sufficient to supply the market and compete against pipeline gas in Asian markets, the agency says.

Essentially, building LNG infrastructure represents a bet against climate success.

Industry optimism

Still, backers of LNG Canada, Woodfibre and Cedar LNG remain optimistic. TC Energy’s $14.5-billion 670-kilometre Coastal GasLink pipeline that will ship supply from the gas fields of northeastern B.C. to the coast is 98% complete, according to the company. Construction at Woodfibre and the LNG Canada site is well underway; LNG Canada expects the first LNG shipments in 2025. Cedar’s owners – the Haisla and Pembina Pipeline Corp. – are aiming to make a final investment decision in the coming months.

Canadian LNG producers maintain that they have the lowest carbon intensity of any facilities in the world. LNG Canada says its phase-one facility will have a life-cycle GHG footprint 65% lower than the global average for the industry and 28% below the best performers. That figure is based on carbon intensity in the Montney gas field of northeastern B.C., as well as “highly efficient processes” and use of renewable power from B.C. Hydro. Carleton’s Energy and Emissions Research Lab also concluded that stronger regulation and monitoring in B.C. has meant that methane intensities are approximately four times lower on average than neighbouring facilities in Alberta, though there are variations between facilities.

LNG Canada’s partners are considering plans to fully electrify phase two of the project, should they decide to proceed. Though that would require completion of a $3-billion transmission project to bring additional power to Kitimat for commercial and residential use. B.C. reportedly wants Ottawa to cover half the cost of the line.

First Nations’ support

Many First Nations leaders in B.C. support the expansion of the LNG industry, seeing it as a path to economic development. That support remains, despite the much-publicized battles over the Coastal GasLink pipeline that will feed LNG Canada and Cedar. Land defenders led by hereditary chiefs of the Wet’suwet’en First Nation have blocked construction on the pipeline right-of-way, prompting a series of arrests by the RCMP. Still, elected First Nations leaders continue to support LNG expansion and, in some cases, have equity positions in projects.

I think [ownership of LNG development] is one of the solutions to helping our people to get out of poverty.

 

Karen Ogen, First Nations LNG Alliance

Karen Ogen – who served as elected chief of the Wet’suwet’en for six years – leads the First Nations LNG Alliance and travelled this fall to Beijing. In a telephone interview, Ogen says Asian nations have communicated their desire for LNG supply from Canada to replace coal, and alliance members are eager to benefit. “For 150 years, we were not included when major projects went through our territories and have not benefited from them,” Ogen says. “I think [ownership of LNG development] is one of the solutions to helping our people to get out of poverty.”

The First Nations communities are looking for loan guarantees from Ottawa to help finance their equity participation in resource projects, including LNG facilities and fossil fuel pipelines. In her fall economic statement in November, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland announced that the federal government would develop a loan guarantee program but provided no details. In a release, the First Nations Major Projects Coalition said Ottawa should not exclude fossil fuel projects from the financing plan, but rather allow First Nations governments to pursue the projects they deem appropriate.

That approach could leave Canadian taxpayers on the hook for massive loans to finance risky fossil fuel projects that are designed to last 30 years. “There is no justification for the Government of Canada to be subsidizing any new oil or gas production, including LNG, no matter the project’s owner,” says Julia Levin, associate director of national climate policy at Environmental Defence.

There is no justification for the Government of Canada to be subsidizing any new oil or gas production, including LNG, no matter the project’s owner.

 

–Julia Levin, associate director of national climate policy at Environmental Defence.

Meanwhile, advocates on both sides of the LNG debate are waiting with bated breath to see where the federal government lands on LNG in its transition taxonomy – will it make the cut or not. Behind the scenes, insiders have told Corporate Knights off the record that the finance minister’s office has been holding up the taxonomy’s release until LNG gets the green light.

In an email, SFAC chair Kathy Bardswick says that individual projects will have to be assessed on their own merits. Individual LNG projects could qualify “if there is a credible link to transition,” she says. “But there is no scenario that will pass scrutiny related to ‘new exploration.’”

In a report for the First Nations Climate Initiative, economist Robert Johnston concludes that Canadian LNG could qualify for the transition taxonomy if methane emissions are minimized and the result tracked and verified. But that’s a lot of ifs, which, as of yet, remain unresolved.

 Back at the COP28 climate summit, 50 companies (including LNG Canada partners Shell and Petronas) signed on to an agreement that commits them to “near zero” methane emissions from their oil and gas production operations. Notably, the commitment covers production but not processing at liquefaction plants or transportation in pipelines or ships. 

Given all the uncertainties, it’s unclear whether Canadian-based producers will be able to benefit in the marketplace from any carbon advantage they claim. Will buyers opt for supplies from a producer that can certify its low GHG intensity? Will they be willing to pay a premium? Would they sell credits from reducing any coal use that the additional LNG supply might allow? To date, there has been little evidence of that type of energy trading.

At most, Canada may add another LNG plant or perhaps two. Investment decisions are looming on Cedar LNG and LNG Canada’s phase two. They will depend on a host of political, environmental and market-based factors.

One thing is clear, however: a major expansion of Canadian LNG production runs counter to climate goals and entails a significant risk of big financial losses down the road for the producer, their First Nations partners and, potentially, for Canadian taxpayers.

Shawn McCarthy is an independent writer focused on energy and climate change. He is also a senior counsel at Sussex Strategy Group.

The post Is the LNG industry gaslighting the path to net-zero? appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The new regulation, which broadly aligns with a similar effort in the United States, will eliminate the equivalent of 217 million tonnes of carbon dioxide pollution between 2027 and 2040 and deliver C$12.4 billion in “avoided global damages”, Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) said in a release. It’s meant to eliminate routine venting and flaring of natural gas, improve methane leak detection and repair, and address the risk of large methane releases.

“We’re seeing here the beginning of a global movement toward almost eliminating methane emissions from the oil and gas sector,” Environment and Climate Change Minister Steven Guilbeault told reporters in Dubai.

“As the world’s fourth largest oil and gas producer, we have both the responsibility and the know-how to do everything we can,” he added in the departmental release. “At this time of robust profit margins and high [fossil] energy prices, there has never been a better time for the oil and gas sector to invest in slashing methane emissions.”

“Great to see Canada taking strong action to achieve deep reductions in oil and gas methane emissions, just as the U.S. finalizes our own regulations,” said U.S. climate envoy John Kerry. “This is an essential strategy to limit warming to 1.5°C.”

Methane is a climate super-pollutant with 80 to 85 times the warming potential of carbon dioxide over the crucial 20-year span when humanity will be scrambling to get climate change under control. Earlier this year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change identified fossil industry methane controls, alongside solar, wind, and energy efficiency deployment, as one of the cheapest ways to deliver faster, deeper emission cuts in this decade.

After signing on to the Global Methane Pledge two years ago during the COP26 meeting in Glasgow, Canada released a methane reduction strategy in September, 2022 that affirmed the 75% reduction from 2012 levels by decade’s end, Guilbeault’s department recalled in a backgrounder published earlier today. ECCC followed with a draft regulation two months later, then updated the draft in September, 2023.

The government is also moving to improve methane monitoring and support provincial action on methane through equivalency agreements with Alberta, British Columbia, and Saskatchewan, the backgrounder stated. And Ottawa earmarked $30 million for a new Methane Centre of Excellence to “improve our understanding and reporting of methane emissions, with a focus on collaborative initiatives to support data and measurement.”

Fossil fuel companies are also moving to get their methane emissions under control, ECCC said in its media release. Earlier in the COP, 50 of the world’s biggest oil and gas companies—none of them Canadian—announced voluntary commitments to reduce their methane emissions 80 to 90% by 2030.

But “voluntary action will never be sufficient,” Stephane Hallegatte Sr., a climate change advisor at the World Bank, told CBC. “Regulations are really, really important. You have to ask all oil and gas companies to check for those leaks. There are great new technologies to monitor leaks in real time and to act on them.”

Climate policy and campaign organizations attending COP28 applauded the federal announcement and urged Ottawa to get on with the job of finalizing the new regulations.

“The best way to fully eliminate methane pollution is by phasing out fossil fuel production,” Climate Action Network-Canada said in a release. “As momentum grows at COP28 towards a full, fair, and funded fossil fuel phaseout, Canada must use every tool at its disposal to reduce the enormous climate impact of its oil and gas industry.”

The new rules “represent a crucial and urgently required move towards a climate-resilient future,” said Tom Green, senior climate policy advisor at the David Suzuki Foundation. “Following a summer marked by destructive wildfires and extreme weather events, it is imperative that we hold the oil and gas sector accountable to achieve immediate methane reductions, which are often underestimated by 50% or more.”

“These new methane regulations can be an initial step toward setting and achieving an ambitious cap on overall greenhouse gas emissions from the oil and gas sector, on the path to a full, fast, and fair phaseout of fossil fuels,” said Greenpeace Canada Senior Energy Strategist Keith Stewart. “Given the consistent evidence of industry under-reporting methane emissions, it will be key to have independent monitoring and testing to ensure companies meet their obligations.”

“These regulations will position Canada as a leader on reducing methane pollution, but Canada should be striving for virtual elimination of methane emissions,” said Julia Levin, associate director, national climate at Environmental Defence Canada. “We urge the government to finalize and bring these regulations into force as quickly as possible.”

Cenovus Energy Chief Sustainability Officer Rhona DelFrari told CBC her company has cut its methane emissions 59% over three years, and is aiming for an 80% reduction from 2019 levels—a considerably easier benchmark than the 2012 reference year in the new federal standard—by 2028.

“Canada has a lot to be proud of in the oil and gas sector when it comes to our methane emissions reductions,” she declared. “We’re well, far ahead of many other countries around the world that are oil-producing jurisdictions.”

But the Alberta government, with a strong presence at COP28, was quick to condemn the federal announcement. “The federal government has unilaterally established new methane emissions rules and targets,” Premier Danielle Smith and Environment Minister Rebecca Schulz said in a joint statement, that called the regulations “illegal” and “unrealistic.”

“Given the unconstitutional nature of this latest federal intrusion into our provincial jurisdiction, our government will use every tool at our disposal to ensure these absurd federal regulations are never implemented in our province,” it concludes.

Today’s federal government backgrounder notes that the latest draft of the methane regulations factored in “extensive consultation on the development and design of the proposed regulations.” As for constitutional rights, Canada’s division of powers gives provinces authority over natural resources but establishes federal jurisdiction over pollution.

This story first appeared in The Energy Mix. Read the original article here. 

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Global momentum on addressing methane emissions is building, and not a moment too soon. 

Already this summer, we have had to turn our attention to the tragic reality of catastrophic weather events, with record temperatures scorching Europe in July and the wildfires that devastated the community of Lytton, B.C., for the second year in a row. It’s often said that nothing happens quickly in climate policy, but addressing methane emissions is one of the quickest, simplest and most affordable ways to make a big difference to our climate’s trajectory. With more than 100 countries (including Canada) signing on to the Global Methane Pledge at last fall’s COP26 summit – and milestone methane reports from the International Energy Agency, the United Nations Environment Programme and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – it is clear that we are now on the precipice of global action.

It is timely, then, that the federal government in Canada is in the process of developing new regulations on methane for the country’s oil and gas sector. The Pembina Institute, as part of a coalition of leading North American climate and energy organizations, has submitted recommendations, including two pivotal proposals: that the government implement new rules fast (starting in 2025) and that it commit to the near-elimination of methane emissions by 2030.

Yes we can

In these types of policy processes, government ambition-setting is important: it defines the parameters of what is considered achievable and lets industry know which way the wind is blowing, so companies can plan accordingly. But in this instance, if the federal government actively sets out to completely stop emitting methane, it would in fact be aligning itself with a pledge already made by the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative (a global consortium of companies – including from Canada – that represent 30% of global oil and gas production). This commitment demonstrates that companies themselves think methane emissions can be eliminated. The government would be wise to take them at their word and regulate that promise, especially with a federal cap on oil and gas sector emissions looming. 

As the primary component of natural gas, and therefore one of the products of oil and gas production, methane tends to be emitted either through leaky equipment (something we call “fugitive emissions”) or when companies decide to designate it a waste product and release it on purpose (“venting”) or burn it (“flaring”). But just as you would not let a leaky bathroom pipe go on leaking until your living room ceiling caved in, oil and gas producers should not let methane escape from their facilities and into the atmosphere, where – with almost 100 times the warming impact of carbon dioxide – it makes an outsized contribution to climate change.

It’s a no-brainer

Some of the things we will need to do to decarbonize Canada’s oil and gas production – the largest source of our annual emissions – require big up-front investments and take time to build (carbon capture and storage, for instance). Solving the methane problem will be incredibly cheap and straightforward by comparison. It mostly involves common-sense preventative measures, such as more regular and rigorous leak-detection and repair regimes at oil and gas facilities or the elimination of routine venting and flaring. Instead, producers can be asked to capture the methane they are emitting and sell it, or use it on-site to avoid wasting a valuable product. This also means the cost of capturing methane is always offset against the potential revenue when that methane is sold – so when natural gas prices are high (as they are now), methane abatement becomes even more affordable for producers. For example, our analysis of a 2019 study from the Canadian Energy Research Institute shows that, at current natural gas prices, oil and gas methane emissions can be reduced by 88% for only $12 per tonne of carbon dioxide equivalent (compared to the current carbon price of $50 per tonne). 

Implementing a strong regulatory framework would also allow Canada to maintain its place as a global leader on methane. Otherwise, we risk falling behind standards being set elsewhere, such as in New Mexico (where all routine venting and flaring is already prohibited) and by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The recipe for success includes close collaboration between our federal and provincial governments, as well as with the United States. In fact, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and President Joe Biden have already highlighted methane as an important area of collaboration in a wide-reaching agreement called the 2021 Roadmap for a Renewed U.S.-Canada Partnership.

This would spur the kind of innovation that tends to be great news for Canadian industry. According to the Methane Emission Leadership Alliance, a grouping of Canada’s leading methane-reduction practitioners, there are more than 170 Canadian companies providing methane-emissions management solutions right now – 80% of which say they expect jobs to grow as a result of methane regulations.

In this sense, we should all be excited about methane, given that it presents us with a win-win-win for the government, industry and Canadians. On our path to net-zero by 2050, this is a rare opportunity that we should grasp with both hands.

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