The environmental NGO Clean Air Task Force published a report on Monday 13 December on methane emissions from oil and gas sites across eleven EU Member States between February and September 2021.
Examining more than 250 sites using special optical gas imaging technology, the NGO found methane emissions at 180 of them and identified a total of 433 emission sources.
This problem affects the entire oil and gas value chain: from upstream to transport and storage, to the point of distribution to consumers, the report says.
The emissions observed were mainly from storage tanks, emergency stacks, unlit flares and other miscellaneous leaks from piping equipment.
The paper also identifies various types of failures leading to methane pollution directly at the wellhead in three oil and gas producing countries: Austria, the Netherlands and especially Romania.
The report comes 2 days before the European Commission presents a proposal for an EU regulation to tackle methane leakage in the energy sector (see EUROPE 12840/13).
See the report: https://bit.ly/3INIXfl (Original version in French by Damien Genicot)