Progress in reducing flaring is often hindered bycommercial, organisational, and political obstacles rather than technical or operational challenges. However, a new methodology will help the sector to significantly improve the measurement of global fugitive methane emissions.
Fugitive methane emissions are an often-invisible consequence of fossil fuel production, but can be reduced and mitigated through reliable monitoring and stronger policy action.
Methane is produced at virtually every oil and gas project around the world, either as a by-product of oil production or directly from gas or gas condensate reservoirs.
While the vast majority of methane produced is sold as natural gas, its emission directly into the atmosphere has substantial impacts on global warming.
While not as prevalent in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, methane is 86 times more potent and accounts for 20 per cent of greenhouse gas-induced global warming.
A report published in May last year by the Columbia Centre on Sustainable Investment, a joint initiative between Columbia University’s Law and Climate schools, noted that despite numerous studies outlining how flared gas could be captured and monetised, progress remained insufficient.
The authors explained that they believed substantial reductions in flaring were not only technically achievable but could often create significant commercial value with attractive returns.
They said: “By reducing flaring, companies and governments can increase revenue, generate valuable assets, enhance energy security, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and accelerate the energy transition.
“Compared with other levers, reducing gas flaring is a material decarbonisation ‘quick win’.”
The authors emphasised that countries with high flaring volumes and intensity could make substantial progress in reducing flaring, to their great benefit.
According to the report, the most challenging obstacles are often commercial, organisational, and political in nature.
Successful delivery of flare-capture projects requires an integrated, thoughtful, and collaborative approach, supported by strong leadership, appropriate incentives, and a relentless focus on execution rather than rhetoric.
The report’s findings were extensive, and the authors highlighted three main generic learnings.
They said: “First, governments must foster an investable environment that facilitates energy security through decisive action and planning, leveraging existing policies and infrastructure and supported by incentives/penalties that are applied and enforced.
“Second, collaboration among governments, national and international oil companies is vital, requiring a ‘country-first’ perspective to drive synergies between assets and projects, with a data-driven approach and creativity in fiscal structuring to ensure that the appropriate incentives are in place to make tackling flaring a true priority for operators, without depriving the government of much-needed revenue.
“Third, government and company leadership must engage, empower, and mobilise resources effectively – ambitions need not only grand initiatives, but also grit.”
NEW METHODOLOGY TO IMPROVE GLOBAL PARTNERSHIP’S DATA COLLECTION
Established at the Dubai COP28 in 2023, the Global Flaring and Methane Reduction Partnership (GFMR) was created to enhance global efforts to eliminate routine gas flaring and reduce methane emissions throughout the oil and gas value chain.
The partnership’s work program provides grant funding and technical assistance, enables policy reform and institutional strengthening, and mobilises financing for governments and state-owned operators.
A notable part of its activities is collecting and reporting methane emissions data through its annual Global Gas Flaring Tracker Report and Dashboard, which provides access to flaring volumes at individual flare sites going back to 2012.
Developed in collaboration between the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Colorado School of Mines’ Payne Institute, the flaring tracker uses satellite-based infrared detection to estimate global flaring volumes.
In a webinar held mid-January, the GFMR outlined major methodology improvements to its data collection and analysis, including improved data coverage through cross-satellite observations (three satellites), improved flare locations by replacing the annual catalogue with multi-year, and improved flare volume estimates through John Zink (JZ) calibration of satellites’ radiant heat in terms of flare volume.
JZ calibration is a transformative empirical method that enhances how satellites estimate the volume of gas being flared. It moves away from less accurate production-reported methods to utilise direct physical measurements based on ground-truth flare tests.
Mikhail Zhizhin, from the Payne Institute, said the GFMR would use detections from three visible infrared imaging radiometer suite (VIIRS) satellites simultaneously for both 2025 flare catalogue updates and billion-cubic-metre estimates, effectively tripling the number of observations per night.
He said: “This reduced under-sampling by increasing the number of independent observations, without changing the underlying measurement approach.”
The multi-year catalogue being implemented features “instant” individual satellite detections resolved into precise single flare features; data “clustered” over multiple years to help better identify intermittent flare locations; and “false” flare detections removed (improved quality control) and more small flares detected (improved sensitivity).
The improved calibration of flare volumes using the JZ method is based on metered data from operational test flares.
It compares simultaneous VIIRS satellite flare radiant heat measurements to accurately metered gas volumes at the John Zink test facility in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It replaces the previous calibration based on mixed-quality country-level data provided by Cedigaz.
The new calibration is supported by flare data from oil and gas operators across a broad range of flare volumes. It offers a robust representation of various operational flare rates through linear calibration, effectively covering nearly the entire spectrum of global flare sizes.
When modelled and applied to operator data, the John Zink calibration remains linear with uncertainty driven by real-world flare diversity.
