The IEA held a workshop in January 2020 that brought together more than sixty members of industry, policy and regulatory bodies, technical experts and other knowledgeable stakeholders to exchange views on ways to best step up efforts to regulate methane emissions from the oil and gas sector.
The meeting was hosted in collaboration with the Florence School of Regulation, the United Nations Environmental Programme, and other partners of the Methane Guiding Principles (MGPs), a multi-stakeholder collaborative platform of industry, intergovernmental organizations, academia, and civil society.
The MGPs were created following the in-depth focus on oil and gas methane emissions in the IEA’s World Energy Outlook (WEO) 2017. The activities under the MGPs aim to reduce the environmental impacts associated with oil and gas supply, recognising that – even with ambitious efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions – these fuels are set to remain part of the energy system for many years to come.
IEA analysis has highlighted over many years the importance of addressing methane emissions from oil and gas operations, as a powerful and cost-effective way to reduce the environmental footprint of these fuels. One of the key ways to do so, written into the principles, is via “sound methane policies and regulations that incentivise early action, drive performance improvements, facilitate proper enforcement, and support flexibility and innovation.”
The one-day event heard presentations from a diverse set of stakeholders—including principal actors from country regulatory bodies and leading thinkers from civil society groups—sparking discussions on how to carry forward lessons learned from existing regulatory approaches in other jurisdictions to mitigating methane, and opportunities to expand the geographic reach of successful methane regulation. In total, more than thirty countries were represented at the workshop.
According to the IEA’s most recent estimates, annual methane emissions from oil and gas are around 80 million metric tonnes. Despite heightened attention to the topic, the effect of today’s voluntary initiatives and commitments from policymakers is not sufficient to meet global climate goals outlined in the Sustainable Development Scenario.
“The world needs to take every opportunity to reduce methane emissions as an integral part of tackling climate change,” IEA Deputy Executive Director Paul Simons said in his opening to the workshop. “Our aim today is to exchange views and lessons learned on what approaches work and what don’t work; what are the different considerations that have shaped regulation and enforcement in different jurisdictions around the world; and what can be done to support and widen these efforts.”
The importance of taking action on feasible, cost-effective methane abatement opportunities has been underscored in consecutive WEO analyses examining the environmental impacts of fossil fuel consumption and production. It was also a core message of an IEA special report, ‘The Oil and Gas Industry in Energy Transitions,’ released last month.
Building on its multi-tiered methane analyses, the IEA has launched the Methane Tracker, an online information platform that lays out a coherent set of estimates for global oil and gas methane emissions on a country-by-country basis. In a first-of-its-kind assessment, the Tracker also estimates the abatement potentials and costs of avoiding emissions that are possible by applying methane mitigation technologies across oil and gas value chains.
Since the Tracker’s initial release in July of last year, a number of new features have been added to the online tool, including a new section that covers policy and regulatory approaches to methane and features a database populated with methane regulatory measures from key oil and gas producing jurisdictions.
Over the course of 2020-21, the IEA will make further advancements to the Tracker with the aim of continuing to develop the tool to be useful for governments, industry and other stakeholders working to tackle methane emissions from the oil and gas sector. These advancements will take a particular eye towards policymakers and regulators seeking to improve or create policy for methane reductions, including continued expansion of the policy and regulation database and the coverage of regulatory analysis. The IEA also plans to reconvene the network of experts within this timeline.
