{"id":733,"date":"2015-10-13T10:46:07","date_gmt":"2015-10-13T09:46:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sustainablegasinstitute.org\/?p=733"},"modified":"2015-10-13T10:46:07","modified_gmt":"2015-10-13T09:46:07","slug":"blog-tackling-methanes-contribution-to-climate-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.imperial.ac.uk\/sustainable-gas-institute\/2015\/10\/13\/blog-tackling-methanes-contribution-to-climate-change\/","title":{"rendered":"BLOG: Tackling methane’s contribution to climate change"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\tA blog by Dr Paul Balcombe from the IPIECA-OGCI Workshop.<\/em><\/p>\n

On Monday 12th<\/sup> October, I presented at a workshop <\/a>in Paris which was focussed on understanding methane emissions from the natural gas supply chain. It\"OGCI<\/a> was a conference organised by IPIECA<\/a> and OGCI<\/a>, who are both voluntary initiatives set up by major oil and gas producers to share knowledge on emissions reductions.<\/p>\n

It was great to get a chance to present the work of the Sustainable Gas Institute on methane and carbon dioxide emissions from the supply chain<\/a> to all these new faces: about 30 new perspectives from industry, as well as some from government, academia and NGOs.<\/p>\n

The aim of the conference was really to pool together all of our knowledge on what we currently know about methane emissions from the natural gas industry. The idea is that we can identify the most important gaps in our knowledge that we need to fill and to discuss how we can start to do this.<\/p>\n

Key headlines<\/strong><\/p>\n

One of the highlights of the conference was a talk by Prof Myles <\/a>\"allenmyles\"<\/a>Allen <\/a>from the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford<\/a>. He delved into detail about the complicated issue of how potent methane is compared to carbon dioxide in terms of climate change. Methane is much more potent in the short term but doesn\u2019t last as long in the atmosphere, so has a much lower lasting effect than CO2<\/sub>. Prof Allen says that, because of this, we need to make sure that we focus on both <\/strong>methane and CO2<\/sub>: if we don\u2019t reduce CO2<\/sub>, we will never stabilise our greenhouse gas emissions; but if we don\u2019t reduce methane, we will have a much larger global temperature when we do reach the peak.<\/p>\n

\"Steve-Hamburg_D4B8294_287x377\"<\/a>Another eye-opener was from a talk by Steve Hamburg<\/a>, who heads up the work done by the Environmental Defense Fund<\/a> on direct methane measurement all across the US. It was great to hear him talk so passionately about the massive task of emissions measurement and reduction. One of the take home messages Steve made was that reducing methane emissions is extremely important because this reduces the speed<\/strong> that we are warming the climate (whereas reducing CO2<\/sub> reduces the overall temperature).<\/p>\n

The key challenges that we summarised from the end of the first day were:<\/p>\n