Toward Multiscale Measurement-Informed Methane Inventories: Reconciling Bottom-Up Site-Level Inventories with Top-Down Measurements Using Continuous Monitoring Systems

Government policies and corporate strategies aimed at reducing methane emissions from the oil and gas sector increasingly rely on measurement-informed, site-level emission inventories, as conventional bottom-up inventories poorly capture temporal variability and the heavy-tailed nature of methane em...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Environmental science & technology 2023-08, Vol.57 (32), p.11823-11833
Main Authors: Daniels, William S., Wang, Jiayang Lyra, Ravikumar, Arvind P., Harrison, Matthew, Roman-White, Selina A., George, Fiji C., Hammerling, Dorit M.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Air Pollutants - analysis
Emission inventories
Emission measurements
Emissions
Energy and Climate
Gas production
Methane
Methane - analysis
Monitoring
Monitoring systems
Natural Gas - analysis
Oil and gas industry
Oil and gas production
Public policy
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Summary:Government policies and corporate strategies aimed at reducing methane emissions from the oil and gas sector increasingly rely on measurement-informed, site-level emission inventories, as conventional bottom-up inventories poorly capture temporal variability and the heavy-tailed nature of methane emissions. This work is based on an 11-month methane measurement campaign at oil and gas production sites. We find that operator-level top-down methane measurements are lower during the end-of-project phase than during the baseline phase. However, gaps persist between end-of-project top-down measurements and bottom-up site-level inventories, which we reconcile with high-frequency data from continuous monitoring systems (CMS). Specifically, we use CMS to (i) validate specific snapshot measurements and determine how they relate to the temporal emission profile of a given site and (ii) create a measurement-informed, site-level inventory that can be validated with top-down measurements to update conventional bottom-up inventories. This work presents a real-world demonstration of how to reconcile CMS rate estimates and top-down snapshot measurements jointly with bottom-up inventories at the site level. More broadly, it demonstrates the importance of multiscale measurements when creating measurement-informed, site-level emission inventories, which is a critical aspect of recent regulatory requirements in the Inflation Reduction Act, voluntary methane initiatives such as the Oil and Gas Methane Partnership 2.0, and corporate strategies.
ISSN:0013-936X
1520-5851
DOI:10.1021/acs.est.3c01121