One Of The Biggest Methane Sources On Earth Isn't A Country Or Company: It's Our Abandoned OIl & Gas Wells & Coal Mines
Abandoned coalmines and oil and gas wells are now one of the biggest sources of the powerful greenhouse gas methane, new data shows, and little effort is being made to clean them up. The methane emissions from abandoned fossil fuel infrastructure now exceed those from Iran, and if considered as a country would be the fourth biggest source in the world, behind China, the US and Russia.
Solving the global methane problem is one of the most urgent issues in tackling the climate crisis: methane is about 80 times more powerful in trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, yet emissions have been increasing. Some methane comes from natural sources such as forests, but most comes as a byproduct of fossil fuel extraction and from agriculture. Reducing those emissions rapidly would help to pause or even reduce temperature rises in the short term, and buy time for the world to shift to a low-carbon economy.
Cleaning up the world’s abandoned facilities would cost about $100bn, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), which has investigated them for the first time in its annual Global Methane Tracker report, published on Wednesday.
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The likelihood of action on this, and on the ongoing issue of methane from existing facilities, from at least two of the world’s biggest emitters seems remote. Russia operates some of the leakiest pipelines and oil and gas production infrastructure, but has largely withdrawn from climate action. The US, which is second behind China in overall methane emissions from the energy sector, was making strides towards cutting methane from its oil and gas operations under Joe Biden. But as part of his recent executive order on the climate, Donald Trump has put methane regulations under review with the potential to scrap them.
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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/may/07/abandoned-infrastructure-one-of-the-biggest-polluters-in-the-world-report