“Anthropogenic [human-caused] methane that we put in the air in 2024 will warm the planet as much over the next 10 years as all the CO2 from burning fossil fuels planetwide this year.” -Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF)
While CO2 is by far the most serious greenhouse gas, one unit of methane, also called “natural gas,” causes roughly 80 times more global warming. Burning the gas for power and other purposes is bad enough, and of course creates CO2. But an astonishing amount of methane simply escapes into the atmosphere, causing that warming. So reducing methane emissions can play a disproportionate role in slowing climate change.
Fred Krupp has been working on this problem longer than just about any other environmentalist. EDF, which he has led for almost 40 years, has been a pioneer both in drawing attention to the methane emissions problem and the opportunity to remediate it. So we were glad recently to talk with Krupp at length about his efforts.
After over a decade of work, EDF recently made two significant and related breakthroughs. First, it helped organize and shepherd a historic new pledge by oil and gas producers to reduce methane emissions. And on March 4, it actually launched its own satellite called MethaneSat. It is the first climate monitoring satellite ever developed by an environmental group. And its instruments will help keep those fossil fuel companies accountable to their promises. “Our goal is to get a 75% reduction in methane emissions in oil and gas, not by some far-away date like 2050 but by 2030,” says Krupp. “We think it’s doable.”
The Oil and Gas Decarbonization Charter, announced in Dubai last November at COP28, committed 52 giant fossil fuel producers, representing 40% of the entire global industry, to reduce methane leaks from their production and transmission facilities to two tenths of a percent of their total gas production. (EDF calculates this would be a 90% reduction from current levels of leakage.) Signatories include Saudi Aramco, ExxonMobil, Shell, the UAE’s ADNOC, and many others. Krupp was on some occasions the only environmentalist in the room during their negotiations.
While methane emissions come from many places, these companies cause a lot of it. The charter itself concedes that oil and gas operations–producing and marketing their products–account for about 9% of total global greenhouse gas emissions.
“The launch of the satellite is a breakthrough, but ultimately just a milestone,” says Krupp. “The goal is to cut emissions. The satellite is a prerequisite because nobody’s got the data yet.” It will collect data over both wide and narrow areas, and can measure methane concentrations as small as 3 parts per billion. EDF says it will watch over sites representing 80% of global oil and gas production.
“Why now?” asks Krupp, rhetorically. “Because we have an opportunity to actually lower the temperatures we would otherwise see in the next decade.” If EDF achieves its own goal of a 75% reduction from oil and gas by 2030, along with reductions from other methane sources it’s working on, “you can cut the warming we would otherwise see by a fraction of a degree,” continues Krupp. “Which means fewer storms, fewer heat waves, and less climate-induced migration or famine.”
But Krupp says the focus on oil and gas is just the first step, since methane can be reduced there faster than in other sectors. The government of New Zealand, a MethaneSat partner, is working on ways to measure and reduce agricultural methane emissions, which are also large. EDF has a project there, too. Its Dairy Methane Action Alliance includes Nestle, General Mills, and Danone. The yogurt maker buys milk from 58,000 farms worldwide, and has committed to a 30% reduction in agricultural methane emissions by 2030. While it’s hard to get cows to burp less, Krupp says one simple tool is to better manage their manure. That alone can reduce a farm’s methane emissions as much as 20%.
Many worry even more about methane from melting permafrost, mostly in arctic tundra. Here too Krupp says MethaneSat can help. Until now nobody has had good data. “This will enable us to get a time series and see if permafrost emissions are increasing,” he explains. “It’s exactly the type of instrument we need to measure if something’s changing in the tundra. It's a real possibility we could have big releases. But scientists are not sure because there is methane-eating bacteria that might increase as emissions increase.”
He worries permafrost emissions could potentially go “over a tripwire so things spiral out of control.” He continues: “So if you’re risk averse, as we all should be on this issue, what’s the most effective way to reduce the possibility of that tripwire? It’s to reduce human-generated emissions now. That’s why EDF continues to work on CO2 emissions, but has doubled down on methane reductions.”
It isn’t cheap to race against time. EDF had to raise $88 million to design, build, and launch MethaneSat (on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket). TED’s Audacious Project helped with the initial $25 million. The lead donors were John and Laura Arnold of Houston. The Robertson Foundation made a big gift, and the Bezos Earth Fund enabled EDF to finish the project.
MethaneSat’s data-gathering won’t begin until next year, but you can already follow progress at Methanesat.org. All its information will be transparent and publicly-accessible.
David Kirkpatrick - Senior Editor
