In their latest blog Finding Petroleum highlights an urgent issue: vast amounts of fugitive methane emissions from the gas grids in the UK and EU remain unmeasured and unreported.

The lack of advanced metrology and independent inspection allows operators to "mark their own homework." It's time for regulatory bodies and industries to embrace satellite technology and independent monitoring to achieve real progress towards NetZero.

Our new report leaves little doubt that there are significant volumes of methane emissions from the U.K. and EU gas grids that as yet go largely unmonitored, unmeasured and unreported, both by asset and by operator. Key takeaways are:

1. At least in part, this is due to the limited metrology that is deployed – “walkers” carrying ‘sniffers’ and optical gas imagers – in contrast to the continually improving satellite sensors targeting ‘super emitters’ emergent in the USA and Canada, independent inspection to the fore.
2. Cross-Atlantic transfer of these satellite technologies is needed but into an integrated system which includes sensors carried by UAVs, in fixed stations, plus those carried by “walkers”.
3. However, a further, major, issue is that the regulatory approaches of the EU Commission and the U.K. Government have allowed operators to police their own emissions, to write their own reports, “mark their own homework”.
4. This situation has many parallels with that in the U.K’s water industry, highlighted by The Times’ Clean It Up campaign(0), from which this quote: 

“Light, it is said, is the best disinfectant. Independent inspection of potentially polluting industries and their impact on the environment should be a given. A company that knows it is liable to periodic monitoring by an outside body should become a cleaner company or face penalties.”

To access the full report, email Finding Petroleum today david@findingpetroleum.com

KeyFacts Energy Industry Directory: Finding Petroleum