Plugging methane, a powerful climate fix

There was little to mark the pipe as a threat to the planet: A skinny gray chimney the same color as the clouds, looming lankily above a gas storage facility at an industrial site in northern Italy. It did not appear to be in use. Then James Turitto took out his camera. Seen through the lens of the $100,000 infrared device calibrated to pick up planet-heating gases, the pipe was belching a stream of methane into the sky. Turitto, who hunts fugitive emissions for the environmental nonprofit Clean Air Task Force (CATF), has seen hundreds of similar leaks at oil and gas sites across Europe that otherwise go unnoticed. The pipe had already been leaking methane when Turitto visited eight months earlier.

Experts say invisible clouds of methane billowing out of fossil fuel facilities like this one are some of the easiest emissions to avoid. Fixing them is no replacement for cutting carbon dioxide pollution, but it represents one of the cheapest tools humanity has to keep global warming in check over the coming decades. “We’re talking about plumbing, literally,” said Turitto.

Methane is a gas responsible for about a quarter of global warming since the Industrial Revolution. While it doesn’t last as long in the atmosphere as CO2, it is 80 times more powerful over a 20-year period.

In 2015 world leaders pledged to keep global warming well below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) — and ideally 1.5 C — by the end of the century in a belated bid to stop weather extremes like storms and heat waves spiralling further out of control. But that lower temperature threshold looks likely to be crossed within the next couple of decades, according to scenarios assessed by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in August. Even if governments were to bring temperatures back down later in the century, some ecosystems would not survive, the scientists found in a follow-up report in February.

Experts say cutting methane could play an outsize role in preventing humanity from overshooting its temperature targets because the gas is so powerful in the short term. A report by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) last year found that nearly halving methane emissions this decade will avoid almost 0.3 C of global warming by the 2040s. “Fast and ambitious methane mitigation is one of the best strategies available today,” said UNEP Executive Director Inger Andersen.

Global methane pollution soared to record levels in 2021, according to data published in April by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of the US government. “If this trend continues it will put serious challenges to our capability to meet climate goals — even if we have very fast, rapid CO2 reduction,” said Yuzhong Zhang, an atmospheric scientist at Westlake University in China. Some of the rise in methane is due to natural releases. But humans have also created three powerful sources of the gas. About 40% of humanity’s methane emissions come from farms, where animals like cattle and sheep belch out huge quantities of the gas as they digest food. Another 20% comes from landfills, where methane is made as bacteria break down organic matter without oxygen. Just over one-third comes from fossil fuel facilities. Methane is the main component in fossil gas — also known as natural gas — and it pours out when fuels are extracted, processed, moved and stored. Because methane emissions from coal are hard to find and fix, scientists have focused their efforts on oil and gas.

“It’s complete low hanging fruit, frankly,” said Dagmar Droogsma, from the Environmental Defense Fund, a group that has documented methane emissions across the US. The solutions are so cheap that “even from a commercial point of view it’s a no-brainer.”

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