The International Energy Agency (IEA) has launched a new online tool that tracks oil and gas-related sources of methane. The new "methane tracker" offers the most comprehensive global picture of methane emissions, covering eight industry areas across more than 70 countries.
This new and unique tool provides the IEA's most up-to-date estimates of current oil and gas methane emissions, drawing on the best available data. IEA projections suggest that oil and, in particular, natural gas will play important roles in the energy system for years to come, even under strong decarbonization scenarios aligned with international climate goals. Reinforcing efforts to minimize methane emissions along their supply chains is an essential complement to the reductions in CO2 that are led by increased efficiency and deployment of clean energy technologies.
Natural gas accounted for almost half the growth in global energy demand in 2018, and 70 percent of the increase came from two countries, the U.S. and China, where the rise in gas came at the expense of coal. This switch to gas has been a factor in preventing a faster rise in global CO2 emissions in recent years.
A new study on "The Role of Gas in Today's Energy Transitions," released by the IEA alongside the methane tracker, shows an additional 1.2 billion metric tons of CO2 could swiftly be abated by switching to gas using existing infrastructure, if prices and regulation are supportive. This would be enough to bring global CO2 emissions back down to where they were in 2013.
Taking both CO2 and methane emissions into account, coal-to-gas switching is currently able to reduce emissions by 50 percent on average in electricity production and by 33 percent in heat generation. The level of deployment of carbon capture, utilization and storage technologies for both coal and gas is another crucial factor for future emissions from those two sectors.
For more information, visit www.iea.org or call +33 1 40 57 65 00.