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The sixth session of the Methane Mondays series was titled: “Mitigation of Methane Emissions from the Extractive Industries in Transition: Concrete Actions, Goals, and the Costs of the Process.”
The goal of the session, which was held within the framework of the 31 annual meeting of the Committee on Sustainable Energy, was to learn about concrete actions undertaken by the UNECE member States to tackle methane emissions from the energy sector (2), identify opportunities for better coordination of their efforts to measure and mitigate those emissions, (3) assess the appetite for unification of monitoring and reporting mechanisms across the ECE region, and (4) highlight the consequences of the narrowly construed methane mitigation policies focusing only on environmental matters and overlooking other important aspects that add up to the overall cost of their implementation
The event started with a short presentation by the United States Environmental Protection Agency(US EPA) describing the concrete actions that the US undertakes domestically and internationally to address the problem of methane emissions.
The presentation addressed the following issues:
- the US' national monitoring, reporting, and mitigation regulations,
- the international methane emissions monitoring and mitigation schemes and initiatives that the US is involved with,
- methane emission targets that the US has adopted and the way how the Government tracks the country’s performance in achieving those goals.
In the remaining part of the meeting the following matters were discussed:
- The appetite of the ECE member States for a region-wide unification of methane emissions monitoring and reporting practices,
- New technologies in monitoring methane emissions, addressing such issues as :
- the current practices in interpreting the data obtained from satellites and airborne platforms,
- reliability of the data acquired from satellite and airborne systems,
- the policy and geopolitical issues related to data acquired from satellite platforms, and
- the real cost of remote methane detection.
- The real costs of methane emissions regulations in the coal sector and how can they be reduced.
- A difference between coal sector and the oil and gas sector in that context.
- Necessity of including Just Transition mechanisms in the methane emissions regulations in the coal sector.
- Life after coal: business models to stimulate new economic activities and jobs in coal regions in transition.