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Technology Collaboration Programme by IEA

Gas Supply Chain Emissions

Lydia Rycroft

Citation: IEAGHG, "Gas Supply Chain Emissions", 2017-TR7, October 2017.

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Publication Overview

This technical review has been undertaken with the aim of providing a summary of the current status of research into greenhouse gas emissions in the natural gas supply chain. Although 90% or more of the CO2 produced at gas fired power plants can be captured, emissions from the supply chain may reduce the near-zero-emission image of gas as an energy source. Emissions are predominantly from two sources:

  1. Methane emissions during production and also fugitive emissions during transport.
  2. CO2 emissions from gas production installations, gas purification plants, pipeline compressors, LNG liquefaction plants, ships and receiving terminals.

Publication Summary

The SGI report concluded that methodologies for quantifying methane emissions needed standardising and currently were not sufficient. The estimation ranges found in their study were large and reductions in uncertainties were required to improve quantification. Estimations from top-down methods were currently much higher than those attributed to sources by bottom-up methods. It was concluded that for successful mitigation bottom-up methods were required but these needed to be improved by the acquisition of more refined data from a larger number of countries.

Since 2015 the knowledge base on how to quantify emissions has been added to by numerous reports. Notably, the divergent estimates calculated by bottom-up and top-down methods have been reduced. There is still an emphasis across all studies that more data is required to improve the accuracies of methods but methods have also been improved. For top-down methods source attribution using isotopes to identify whether methane is from fossil fuels or biogenic has been successful and helped reduce estimates to coincide with bottom-up estimates. The SGI report highlighted that a focus on super-emitters and calculating emission from major sources was required to improve bottom-up estimates but no work seems to have developed this further since 2015.

A key element following on from the SGI work was how to mitigate the sources along the gas supply chain once they had been identified. The greatest mitigation potential was identified at ‘super-emitter’ sources where emissions could be reduced dramatically. Limited in depth work has been published in this area since 2015 with most focussing on how compatible unconventional sources are for various climate targets and that mitigation will be required. The specific research on how this will be conducted, how much emissions can be reduced and at what part in the supply chain this can occur is still not available.

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