Listened to the most recent episode of Energy Transition podcast about methane emissions.
It was an interview with Georges Tijbosch from a new non-profit called MiQ who's goal is to regulate and standardize methane emissions across the industry so consumers and buyers can choose to buy lower emission products. As he explained, over a 20 year span methane is about 84x worse for heat trapping than CO2, and very little is known about methane emissions from well to consumer. Losses are everywhere in the chain and very little good work has been done to standardize the emissions so they can be quantified and acted upon. By his estimation moving everyone to best in class would be the equivalent of taking 1.2 Billion cars off the road.
Firstly, I haven't heard these types of numbers thrown around before, and if it were that large, one would have to think there would have been more focus on this by now. Which makes me then think, is this an industry push through non-profit to use environmental branding to gain market share over "dirtier" production countries like Russia and Iran? The only reason I don't think that is true is that MiQ appears to be an offshoot of the Rocky Mountain Institute which doesn't seem to be in step with O&G industry.
If this is the case, has there been a better opportunity for Alberta to go this way? I'm certain Norway is already leading on this front, but Canada could quickly put in these types of industry standards and sell LNG as "cleaner" gas than our competitors?
I'm really interested in what those in the gas industry think of all this. Is it all nonsense? Would the means to lower leakage/flaring eat too much into margins to be worthwhile? Is it even feasible with all of the different production methods?
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