A number of oil and gas companies have pledged to reach net zero emissions by 2050. LONDON: Last autumn, European Space Agency satellites detected huge plumes of the invisible planet-warming gas methane leaking from the Yamal pipeline that carries natural gas from Siberia to Europe.
Such a revelation would heap pressure on energy companies – already targeted by climate activists and investors for their contribution to carbon dioxide emissions – to find and plug methane leaks. "What this now shows is that the avoidance of that fossil leakage actually can have a larger impact than what was anticipated earlier," said Imperial College London climate scientist Joeri Rogelj, who is one of the authors for reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change .
The push to detect emissions from the sky began when United States advocacy group Environmental Defence Fund and universities including Harvard used aerial measurements to show methane leaks from America's oil and gas heartland were 60 per cent above inventories reported to the US Environmental Protection Agency.
In an October report, GHGSat estimated the leak released 142,000 tonnes of methane in the 12 months to the end of January 2019 and said then it was the biggest on record. The Yamal-Europe pipeline stretches 2,000km from Germany through Poland and Belarus to Russia where it joins the 2,200km SRTO–Torzhok pipeline to Siberia's gas fields.
McGlade said the IEA increased the projected contributions of several countries in central Asia and North Africa in its Methane Tracker this year because of the satellite detections.According to current IEA estimates of methane emitting countries, Russia is closely followed by the US, with other large oil and gas producers such as Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia further down the list.
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