For decades, fossil fuel companies have tried to bamboozle the public into thinking that the methane they sell under the deceptive name “natural gas” is a clean “bridge fuel” to the future. It is not. Although it does burn cleaner than coal, methane itself is 80 times more destructive to the atmosphere than carbon dioxide.
The World Bank, along with the EU and other regulators, has been using satellites for years to find and document gas flares, asking energy companies to find ways of capturing the gas instead of burning or venting it. The bank set up the Zero Routine Flaring 2030 initiative at the Paris climate conference to eradicate unnecessary flaring. Its latest report finds that flaring decreased by 3% globally from 2021 to 2022.
Without the satellite data, countries must rely primarily on self-disclosed reporting from fossil fuel companies, researchers said, and the ability of researchers to understand pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from the energy sector could be jeopardized. Colorado became the first and only US state to ban routine flaring in 2021. But Maxar satellite imagery shows enclosed flares replacing open flares in the run-up to the Colorado ban on flaring.
Zubin Bamji, the program manager for the World Bank Global Flaring and Methane Reduction Partnership, said volumes from enclosed flares were “very small and are unlikely to have a significant impact on flare volume estimates at a regional, country or global level,” but confirmed that VIIRS did not classify enclosed flaring devices as flares.
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