1 research outputs found
Ground-Based Mobile Measurements to Track Urban Methane Emissions from Natural Gas in 12 Cities across Eight Countries
To mitigate methane emission from urban natural gas distribution
systems, it is crucial to understand local leak rates and occurrence
rates. To explore urban methane emissions in cities outside the U.S.,
where significant emissions were found previously, mobile measurements
were performed in 12 cities across eight countries. The surveyed cities
range from medium size, like Groningen, NL, to large size, like Toronto,
CA, and London, UK. Furthermore, this survey spanned across European
regions from Barcelona, ES, to Bucharest, RO. The joint analysis of
all data allows us to focus on general emission behavior for cities
with different infrastructure and environmental conditions. We find
that all cities have a spectrum of small, medium, and large methane
sources in their domain. The emission rates found follow a heavy-tailed
distribution, and the top 10% of emitters account for 60–80%
of total emissions, which implies that strategic repair planning could
help reduce emissions quickly. Furthermore, we compare our findings
with inventory estimates for urban natural gas-related methane emissions
from this sector in Europe. While cities with larger reported emissions
were found to generally also have larger observed emissions, we find
clear discrepancies between observation-based and inventory-based
emission estimates for our 12 cities