A Pragmatic Approach to Methane Measurement and Mitigation

Oil and gas companies have some of the most talented engineers on the planet working for them, says Erin Tullos, Consultant, Oil and Gas Methane Partnership 2.0. If there’s anyone who can come up with good solutions to measure and mitigate methane, it’s them.

Methane emissions have come under an increasing spotlight in recent years as awareness of the role of the gas in climate change has intensified. The gas is a key component of natural gas and is often a by-product of oil extraction. The IEA estimates that methane is 80 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

But in the global race to reduce methane emissions, the oil and gas industry faces a challenge: current methods to account for methane emissions are highly generalized and work on averages. How can you ensure that you’re focusing your mitigation efforts on the areas of greatest impact if your data is not accurate?

The Oil and Gas Methane Partnership 2.0 (OGMP) is a United Nations led initiative that brings together oil and gas companies, including pipelines and other providers to the industry, to create a measurement-based reporting framework. The aim is more accurate and transparent methane emissions reporting in the oil and gas sector.  

As Tullos explains in this interview, better measurement helps operators target critical opportunities for improvement.

In this interview, Tullos, shares her thoughts on the role of data in fighting emissions, offers her perspectives on the common challenges that operators face, and explains why cross functional teams are essential to reducing methane emissions.

Diana Davis, Oil and Gas IQ: I love your LinkedIn tagline – “fighting carbon emissions with high quality data information and insights.” Let’s start there. How does data help in the fight against emissions?

Erin Tullos, Oil and Gas Methane Partnership 2.0 (OGMP 2.0): Having spent the first 15 years of my career inside oil and gas companies, I know that the first step reducing emissions is having a baseline of your sources.

These baselining activities can range from annual generic emission factors such as national annual averages through to detailed measurements on an equipment-by-equipment basis.

While there are pros and cons to these approaches, what you want to do is ensure that your measurements are sufficiently accurate to inform your mitigation strategies.

Diana Davis, Oil and Gas IQ: What are the limitations with our current use of data for emissions reporting and mitigation?

Erin Tullos, OGMP 2.0:  From a North American perspective – for example, reporting to the EPA's greenhouse Gas reporting program and analogous methods in Canada - operators rely on apply highly averaged emission and activity factors.

For instance, a pump or pneumatic controller will be represented by the same emission factor regardless of where it is, how it's used, or how it's maintained.

This high-level method is practical for the purposes of racking up national inventories. On an average basis, over an annual period, the emissions will balance out even if you overestimate some emissions and you underestimate others.

But if you want to understand an individual asset, it doesn't do you a lot of good. There are really important operational details that influence the actual emissions of a specific piece of equipment, such as maintenance.

At the other end of the spectrum, you could try and accurately measure everything. The problem with that scenario is that it might just create a lot of cost and measurement for the sake of measurement.

In that scenario you have spent all of your capital measuring your emissions and left yourself without resources to mitigate them.

We believe in a hybrid approach where you add common sense measurements to augment your understanding of your emissions. You want to ensure that they are asset specific and that you're not missing anything significant. This gives you a more practical approach, and that's what we focus on at the Oil and Gas Methane Partnership 2.0.

We say that an operator equipped with good information about their sources of emissions has the ability to reduce those emissions.

Diana Davis, Oil and Gas IQ: How do you make those trade-offs in terms of the time and cost it's going to take to actually get those accurate measurements?  What can operators do to make the process easier?

Erin Tullos, OGMP 2.0: There is no silver bullet when it comes to the measurements themselves. We often start with a concept that we refer to as materiality.

You start with your best available information. Ideally, you will at least have those generic annual average emission factors. Then you rank your emissions sources in order of size, which will give you a sense of where you should focus your efforts first.

If your smallest emission source – something that accounts for 1% of your overall emissions, for instance - is 100% off, it won’t really change your emission inventory very much. A source that accounts for 60% of your emissions, on the other hand, is a bigger problem if it’s off by that same amount.

So, start with the largest source first based upon the best information you have. Then, understand what emissions you are trying to see so that you can select a measuring and monitoring technology that makes sense to supplement the operational data you already have.

Operators have the most capable engineers on the planet. They build facilities in the Arctic Circle. They figure out how to build ice roads and maintain facilities and virtually impossible conditions. They build in deep water. These engineers are very capable of identifying their next best approach.

If your engineers were going to stop and think about it from an engineering perspective, they should be able to identify the extra parameters you need to know – either operationally or from a third-party measurement – to sharpen your pencil.

That's what we're really looking for. We don’t want an infinite amount of measuring for the sake of measuring. Instead, we want to sharpen our pencil and have a better understanding of the opportunities for reduction.

Diana Davis, Oil and Gas IQ:  It sounds like the people in charge of reducing carbon and methane emissions really need to be engaging with operational and engineering teams.

Erin Tullos, OGMP 2.0: Absolutely. When operators think about reliability, they would never have a separate team that didn't talk to operations.

Analogously, it wouldn't make sense for an environmental team to sit in a silo and try and dream up better methods to estimate emissions without engaging those teams that understand what is intended, what can be changed, where something is unreliable, and what the options are.

Engineered emissions are either intended in the design, such as gas flaring, or problems with the reliability of a piece of equipment.

Sometimes a solution can be a hardware replacement, or simply a matter of doing better maintenance. Operators must think about emissions as an attribute of operations in the same way that they do reliability.

Diana Davis, Oil and Gas IQ:  Bringing it to your session at our upcoming Methane Mitigation Summit. Can you tell me a little bit more about your work at the oil and gas Methane Partnership 2.0?

Erin Tullos, OGMP 2.0: I am a senior advisor with a focus on uncertainty and reconciliation in measurement. Within the oil and gas methane partnership, there are a handful of us that have three or four primary responsibilities.

The first is to engage with the members and facilitate knowledge transfer.

One of my favorite things about the oil and gas methane partnership is the focus on partnership. It is not our goal to differentiate operators. It is our goal to accelerate understanding of emissions on a global basis so that in the next 89 months between now and 2030, we can achieve the reductions necessary to stay on pathway for a 1.5-degree temperature increase.

With that in mind, we find that operators that individually try and crack this nut on their own are going to collectively be slower than if they lean in and work together.

I'm spoiled living in the United States, where there are very advanced emission estimating methodologies. But there are still locations in the world that have not spent any time at all trying to think about methane emissions in the oil and gas value chain. So, making sure that we're disseminating this information on a global basis is critical.

The second thing we do is we write guidance. The United Nations generally works on a consensus basis, and within the OGMP that is no different. All of our guidance is consensus based so that we can produce guidance that is relevant, helpful and drives alignment across more than 85 member companies plus the European Commission and the Environmental Defense Fund. It’s no small task.

The third thing that we do is we grade the reports. We work with companies to understand how we can help them. At the end of the day, they are going to turn in their methane emissions representations to the OGMP and their implementation plans. We review them and grade them to assess whether or not a company has achieved the gold standard.

The fourth thing we do is write reports and hold conferences to again facilitate knowledge sharing within the membership.

Diana Davis, Oil and Gas IQ:  With regards reporting, are there common challenges that a lot of operators face with regards their measurement and reporting processes?

Erin Tullos, OGMP 2.0: There are still a number of technical challenges. The methane detection technology ecosystem is still emergent. That means there’s not a lot of great historical knowledge on how to apply those technologies as they continue to evolve.

Another challenge is organizational alignment. There are finite resources in every organization and that internal prioritization piece can be a challenge, particularly before companies have selected what type of activities are going to be involved.

The third challenge that I've heard from almost every single company that's ever considering any sort of voluntary certification or program like OGMP is that the regulatory environment requires emissions to be calculated on a certain basis. In the case of the United States on the US greenhouse Gas reporting program basis, for instance, it's highly prescriptive.

Operators are therefore nervous about reporting their emissions to someone else other than the regulatory body. You’re duplicating your resources doing something in two different ways and you also have a messaging problem. Which answer is correct? How do you explain the discrepancy?

Diana Davis, Oil and Gas IQ:  Speaking more generally, one of the criticisms that I have heard of the industry is that methane reduction can be a bit of a sleight of hand. If you're a big producer and you have a dirty asset, the fastest way to reduce your emissions is to sell that asset. You’ve moved the emissions off your books but haven’t actually reduced emissions. Is this something that you’ve seen in the industry?

Erin Tullos, OGMP 2.0:  I have definitely seen that in the industry. It is a topic that we talk about in the OGMP quite frequently and something that we track among our members.

I don’t want to imply that divestment strategies always center around methane reduction.

There are lots of reasons for divestment, but when the divestment hinges on reducing methane emissions, the most disappointing part about that strategy is that usually the company that cares about their emission intensity is going to sell their asset to someone who cares less. That’s not always the case, but it often is.

On the flip side, we've also started to see some small companies think about the business opportunity of “greening” the oil field. We've seen some companies trying to put together a business model around buying these more methane intensive assets – perhaps at a discount - and making investments in improving their emission intensity.

Diana Davis, Oil and Gas IQ:  Is there any particular advice you would offer about responsibly divesting methane intensive assets?  

Erin Tullos, OGMP 2.0:  I think starting with a good understanding of the baseline emissions is important so that the new operator picks up a methodology and doesn’t have to start from scratch. The conscious operator should be really transparent about their divestment and how that impacts their emissions profile and encourage new operator partners to participate also in OGMP.

Diana Davis, Oil and Gas IQ:  What are you most looking forward to at the event?

Erin Tullos, OGMP 2.0:  Invariably, I’m looking forward to meeting new people and hearing new ideas that are not part of common thinking. As new voices continue to join this conversation, we see a spark of creativity and partnerships that lead to new solutions that are usually lower cost and more impactful.

As someone who has been working in this space for a long time, I’m also looking forward to sharing some lessons learned and my aha moments along the way.

Interested in learning more about this topic?

Erin Tullos will be speaking in more detail about how industry collaborations are leading abatement efforts at North America's largest summit on measuring, monitoring and mitigating methane emissions. If you’re tasked with reducing methane emissions in your operations, join us at the National Summit on Methane Mitigation, taking place at the Norris Conference Centre, Houston on December 6-8, 2022. Download the agenda for more information.