Global Tracking and Quantification of Oil and Gas Methane Emissions from Recurrent Sentinel-2 Imagery

Methane (CH4) emission estimates from top-down studies over oil and gas basins have revealed systematic underestimation of CH4 emissions in current national inventories. Sparse but extremely large amounts of CH4 from oil and gas production activities have been detected across the globe, resulting in a significant increase of the overall oil and gas contribution. However, attribution to specific facilities remains a major challenge unless high-spatial-resolution images provide sufficient granularity within the oil and gas basin. In this paper, we monitor known oil and gas infrastructures across the globe using recurrent Sentinel-2 imagery to detect and quantify more than 1200 CH4 emissions. In combination with emission estimates from airborne and Sentinel-5P measurements, we demonstrate the robustness of the fit to a power law from 0.1 tCH4/h to 600 tCH4/h. We conclude here that the prevalence of ultraemitters (>25tCH4/h) detected globally by Sentinel-5P directly relates to emission occurrences below its detection threshold in the range >2tCH4/h, which correspond to large emitters covered by Sentinel-2. We also verified that this relation is also valid at a more local scale for two specific countries, namely, Algeria and Turkmenistan, and the Permian basin in the United States.