Countries, companies lag in response to tackle methane emissions, UN says

By Gloria Dickie, Valerie Volcovici and Nailia Bagirova

BAKU (Reuters) - Since a U.N. initiative began monitoring for methane leaks from oil and gas infrastructure last year, it has issued 1,200 alerts to governments and companies.

But only 12 of those alerts for major plumes - just 1% - garnered a "substantive response" with action taken to plug the leaks, according to a report by the U.N. International Methane Emissions Observatory on Friday.  

"We had expected [the response rate] to be substantially higher," the programme's lead architect, Roland Kupers, told a presentation at the COP29 climate summit in Azerbaijan. 

Many who were notified of the large methane plumes detected by satellites within their borders had signed up to a global pledge launched three years ago to cut methane emissions by 30% from 2020 levels by 2030. 

"Governments and oil and gas companies ... must stop paying lip service to this challenge," said Inger Andersen, executive director of the U.N. Environment Programme, under which the Methane Alert and Response System monitoring program is run. 

"They should recognise a significant opportunity that this system presents and start responding by plugging leaks that are spewing out climate-warming methane."

Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, with 80 times the warming power of carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. To date, methane emissions have driven about 0.5 degrees Celsius in global warming, or a third of global temperature rise seen since the mid-19th century. 

Capping leaks from oil and gas wells and equipment is one of the fastest ways to start tackling the problem, experts say. It also makes financial sense, they say, noting that lost methane means lost product.

Methane emissions from the oil and gas industry have remained at a record high since 2019, despite 150 countries signing onto the Global Methane Pledge. 

Roughly 140 companies have signed onto another effort, the U.N.'s Oil and Gas Methane Partnership 2.0, committing to tackle unintentional methane outputs. 

From the U.N. program's data, Turkmenistan had the most leak incidents of any country, with nearly 400 plumes detected. 

The United States came in second, with 178 incidents, while this year's COP29 host Azerbaijan received alerts for 32 plumes. 

The report's findings were limited by the fact that methane can sometimes be obscured from satellite detection by cloud cover. 

The few responses made to leak alerts were in Algeria, Azerbaijan, Nigeria and the United States, the UNEP report said. 

With a number of satellite programmes launched over the last year to track methane, some companies have said they would use the data to comply with any new national methane regulations.

Developing countries can also use leak data to solicit financing to address the problem, and philanthropies last year announced nearly half a billion to support that effort. 

Azerbaijan's state oil company, SOCAR, which joined other national oil and gas companies in last year's voluntary Oil and Gas Decarbonization Charter committing to zero out methane this decade, said it also has so far identified 400 leaks through satellite monitoring.

(Reporting by Gloria Dickie, Valerie Volcovici and Nailia Bagirova; Editing by Katy Daigle and David Evans)