Transcript provided by Kensho.

Lindsey Hall

I'm Lindsey Hall.

Esther Whieldon

And I'm Esther Whieldon.

Lindsey Hall

Welcome to All Things Sustainable, a podcast from S&P Global. As your hosts, we'll dive into all the sustainability topics that are reshaping the business world.

Esther Whieldon

Join us every Friday for in-depth analysis and interviews with leaders from around the globe. Together, we'll break down big sustainability headlines and cut through the jargon. When it comes to climate change, efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions often focus on carbon dioxide, and that makes sense because carbon stays in the atmosphere for a very long time and is the primary contributor to global warming over the century.

Yes. And as we've heard from this podcast many times, cutting carbon emissions is complicated. It will require major investments in infrastructure and low carbon technologies as well as action by all sectors. Meanwhile, we've heard from scientists the world needs to act fast to reduce emissions because the impacts of climate change scale up very rapidly with every degree of warming.

Lindsey Hall

Now the major types of greenhouse gases include carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, and various synthetic chemicals as well as the topic of today's episode, methane. We'll be hearing how methane emissions from oil and gas companies can be tackled now in a cost-effective way.

A lot of those emissions come from natural gas, which is primarily made up of methane and is invisible to the human eye. So it's been hard to measure and verify until recently. Globally, the energy sector accounts for more than 1/3 of total methane emissions attributable to human activity.

That's according to the International Energy Agency. Methane is the second largest contributor to global warming behind carbon dioxide, but it's significantly more potent as a greenhouse gas. On a 100-year time scale, methane has 28x greater global warming potential than carbon dioxide, and on a 20-year time scale, it's more than 80x as potent.

Esther Whieldon

Today, we'll explore how advances in technologies for monitoring and measuring methane emissions have unlocked the ability of energy companies to understand and address those emissions.

We'll look at why methane emissions matter and what it will take to address them. For this, we talk to Steven Hamburg, Senior Vice President and Chief Scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund or EDF. EDF is a global nonprofit tackling climate change and its primary headquarters are in New York City, and Steven has led the organization's work on methane emissions, including the launch of a methane monitoring satellite called MethaneSAT that they launched in March 2024.

We also talk with Dominic Watson, Senior Manager on the energy transition team at EDF+Business. That's a division of EDF in which Dominic works with a variety of stakeholders on methane management and disclosures, including with oil and gas companies.

We'll also hear from Georges Tijbosch, CEO of MiQ, which stands for Methane Intelligence. MiQ is a not-for-profit headquartered in Boulder, Colorado that was founded in 2020. It works with oil and gas companies to certify their methane emissions and emissions reductions across their Scope 1 direct emissions and Scope 2 emissions associated with purchased energy.

I sat down with all three of today's guests on the sidelines at the 2025 CERAWeek Energy Conference S&P Global hosted in Houston in March. First up is my interview with Steven and Dominic of EDF, where Steven begins by explaining why methane emissions matter.

Steven Hamburg

So methane is responsible for 30% of the warming that we currently experience. And the key here is that methane is a short-lived climate pollutant. So it is the dominant driver of the rate of warming that we see in the near term or the next couple of decades. So if we can reduce methane emissions significantly, which is technologically completely feasible, we can slow the rate of warming between now and 2050.

Esther Whieldon

So is it the slow accumulation of carbon that's the longer-term risk versus shorter-term risk?

Steven Hamburg

Correct. So we're seeing CO2, carbon dioxide increasing in the atmosphere. That's a very long-lived. It's going to stay in the atmosphere hundreds of thousands of years, and methane is only staying in the atmosphere roughly a decade.

So the advantage we have with methane is that if we reduce our emissions, the concentrations actually can go down and certainly not increase. And because it's so potent as a greenhouse gas, that has a really big impact.

And that effect is to slow the rate of increase in warming. But we have to be careful. We are not doing methane instead of carbon dioxide. We need to do both. We needed to reduce both the short-lived climate pollutants, which methane is the dominant one, and we need to decrease the emissions and accumulation of carbon dioxide, which is the dominant long-lived climate pollutant.

Esther Whieldon

So tell me about what has been the challenge with measuring and monitoring methane emissions.

Steven Hamburg

So 15 years ago, when we started working on methane, there was essentially no data on methane emissions from the oil and gas industry. All emissions were calculated, not measured. And what it turned out is we started to measure it, and we coordinated a large campaign with literally a couple of hundred scientists to look at methane emissions across the United States, across multiple basins is that very often, where people thought the emissions were was not where they actually were.

We also didn't understand the quantities. We didn't understand the sources, so we really needed to increase the quality and quantity of data we had if we had any hope of reducing those emissions. We worked with a lot of companies, with a lot of academics to build that much clearer picture. And the bulk of the early work was done in the United States, and we did produce a much clearer picture of what was going on.

We actually published a paper with 26 co-authors from 19 different institutions in 2018 in a very high visibility journal of science, where we really put that all together. That was the first time that it had ever been done for anywhere in the world. The key, though, was we really needed data on a continuous basis, and we need it on a global basis. That's why we then went to developing MethaneSAT and the need for high-quality remote sensing, which would allow us to provide data across the sector and across the globe, something we've never had before.

We've never had empirical data before for an entire sector on a global basis. This will be the first for the oil and gas production sector. The key is we're doing some very new and innovative things, so we have to go slowly and validate the data and make sure we get high-quality data. And that's what we've been doing. We had two big things, challenging things we had to do. One was produce a much higher precision satellite.

So just to collect much more precise data, and we needed to do that on a large scale with very fine spatial resolution, and we were able to do that. We're producing -- the data has really been fantastic, and then we had to convert what the satellite sees is concentration data, and that's not directly usable. You can't assume the concentration correlates with emissions. You have to actually do something called an inversion, kind of think about running the moving picture backwards.

So not where is the methane now, but where did it come from. So you take the wins and you calculate where the methane come from and how much. And it's actually a fairly well-established technique. But obviously, we're using large quantities of data. And so we needed to automate that whole system. We had to do that, so that all the data we bring down from the satellite is produced to at a rate of emissions and the distribution.

So we have three basic products for MethaneSAT. We have at some large geography basin, ultimately, how much methane is being emitted as well as the distribution of that -- those emissions, so we get a heat map across the basin, where they're being distributed.

And then we also see the large point sources, the individual large sources. So we produce those three products for almost all of our scenes, and we can do that across all the basins. But ultimately, what we really want to do is stack those different scenes together, so we can look at how it changes over time. But in the near term, we can stack them and really understand how consistent the results are and what the uncertainty is.

Esther Whieldon

Okay. So two questions. So how is it able to -- I hear methane is invisible, right? It doesn't really have a smell. So how does the satellite track methane? How does it identify it? And then the second part of that question is, how do you differentiate sourcing like natural gas and oil versus agriculture versus defrosting ice or whatever else it might be, right?

Steven Hamburg

So it's critical to understand source attribution. So what we do is because we're doing it spatially with fine spatial resolution, we've built global maps of oil and gas infrastructure using public information. So we look at where that source is and is it coming from an area where there's oil and gas. We also can look at other databases. Is there co-occurring things in that same area? Is there agriculture? Is there intermix?

We have to be very careful, obviously, to ensure that we're not attributing agricultural emissions to oil and gas or vice versa. In many of the basins, that's not complicated because it really is -- there aren't those complicating factors, and some there are.

And so we work really hard to do that to separate it and then working with companies and others in the industry to ensure that we have the best data so our separation is most effective. And the satellite works in a very simple principle that the light coming from the sun reflects off the earth and then goes back up into space, and we collect that light.

As that light is traveling through the atmosphere, the reflected light, it's being affected by the different molecules it interacts with because it does -- in some of the molecules like methane absorb energy, and it changes the wavelengths of that light.

And by using a very, very precise spectrometer, very, very sensitive and very small calibrated wavelengths, which are relevant to methane, we can see very, very small differences in concentration, literally two to three parts per billion. We're at 580 kilometers in the sky, and that's really critical, so we can see a large area and we can integrate and we can travel the earth. We're going around the earth basically every 95 minutes, and so we can see anywhere on the earth roughly every three or four days.

Esther Whieldon

So what have you been finding so far?

Steven Hamburg

Well, I think the most important is that we're seeing -- we're really getting high-quality data. and it's really proving to be very effective. It's lining up well with other data. So one of the things we're doing is we're really challenging the data, right? We want to make sure, does this make sense? Does it look like other things have been collected?

So we've been spending a lot of time challenging our own data. So we are confident and then having other people challenge the data, and that's all looking good. But it takes time. So even though we've been flying for a year, we haven't put out a lot of data because we're going slow and cautiously. And so it's looking good. But it's a daunting task.

I mean, what we're trying to do is very audacious, and so that's really critical. And I should mention, it's important to say that this has been philanthropically funded are some of our lead donors, was Bezos Earth Fund, the Audacious Project of TED, the Hello Foundation.

And so we're making all this data public. This is about creating transparency, radical transparency that these data are available to everyone, to the companies, to government, to civil society because we believe firmly that by doing that, we can really understand the problem better. People can understand how people are performing, and that's critical if we're going to make rapid progress in reducing emissions.

Esther Whieldon

I am fully supportive of transparency and access to information.

Steven Hamburg

But most of it -- but this is important. Most of the data on methane is not transparent.

Esther Whieldon

Because it comes from the companies or...

Steven Hamburg

They're hiring someone and they're keeping it. We really believe that we need to change. As companies get more comfortable with what they're doing, they'll be more open to -- but that kind of transparently is ultimately what we need to have a well-functioning oil and gas industry, well-functioning financial sector, so people can understand how well everyone is doing and have confidence in it.

So that's where it's also important. We have the oil and gas methane partnership, which sets rules about data. And currently, that data is reviewed publicly but is held privately. I'm really hoping that we can set the tone for about radical transparency because ultimately, we all benefit from that transparency.

Esther Whieldon

Thank you. So Dominic, let me turn to you now. What is the business aspect of this for you? How are you talking with companies about this? And what are you hearing from them?

Dominic Watson

Yes. I think first and foremost, this data is meant to drive emissions reductions. This is not a name and shame exercise. This is not about ranking companies on their performance. This is about getting the information that's needed into the hands of those that can go out and reduce emissions.

So I think that's the first thing to state about one of the goals of MethaneSAT. What we've seen from the private sector is positive engagement, especially from leading operators that are already taking steps to reduce emissions from -- within their operations. And I think it's welcomed. It's -- this is a test, right? If you've been studying for the test for the past few years, you're going to pass it when it comes over.

Esther Whieldon

What is the economic or business or bottom line incentive for them on this?

Dominic Watson

Well, I think it's really important to understand that despite the scale of the problem, solving it is largely cost effective. McKinsey recently put out a report that estimated that about half of the oil and gas industry's Scope 1 and 2 emissions could be reduced at no net cost or at very little cost, and that's an enormous amount of emissions. That's almost 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

And that's just an enormous opportunity that could be addressed essentially through operational efficiencies. There's no other sector out there that has such an immediate opportunity that it could be taken advantage of, so I think that's the first driver is the cost effectiveness of this. But beyond that, there are pressures on this industry to decarbonize.

And the quickest way to do so is through addressing this cost-effective challenge. Investors are, despite rhetoric you might hear in the news, are continuing to demand decarbonization from the industry.

Increasingly, gas import markets in the EU and Asia are looking at methane emissions from the supply chain and are looking at ways to be able to decarbonize the gas that they are importing to their markets and regulators around the world who will be one of the key audiences for MethaneSAT are increasingly putting out regulations to ensure that industries within their jurisdictions are addressing methane emissions.

Steven Hamburg

It's important to realize that the methane emissions currently from oil and gas production and the supply chain in the United States are large enough that they roughly double the climate impact of use, burning natural gas over a 20-year period.

Esther Whieldon

From just the United States?

Steven Hamburg

These are production in the United States because that's where we have the best numbers right now. So if you take that, and we've published all of this, it's all public, is you take how much is being emitted on average, right?

That's not a company specific. We're talking about aggregate and look at it across the supply chain. Those emissions means that like I use natural gas in the boiler in my house. Is my climate impact upstream of my boiler equals over a 20-year period, the next 20 years, equals the impact of the combustion of that gas in my boiler.

So this is really a big deal, and we need to recognize that. That data is clear. We can't wish it away. We have to work to put -- to reduce it. And that is technologically feasible, as Dominic said, right? This is important. This is not theoretical. This is real. There are lots of places we've seen it, we've measured it that are doing this well and not having -- and having low emissions. What we need to do is make that ubiquitous.

Dominic Watson

Yes, it's plumbing. It's not rocket science.

Esther Whieldon

So the thing that always pops up on my mind when I hear about methane is why are we just getting to this now? Like we've known methane is potent and more potent, although less long-lasting the carbon. So what has allowed and/or hindered us getting to it from now?

Steven Hamburg

Well, it was a simple accounting issue that was well attention but ultimately had that perverse impact of ignoring methane. So we, under the Kyoto protocol, started looking at everything over 100 years and doing pulse emissions.

Sorry, it's a little technical, but how much -- what's the impact of putting emissions out this year or right now, but not continuously? And when you compare short-lived climate pollutants to long-lived climate pollutants, when you go longer periods of time, of course, the longer living ones have much bigger impact.

So once we stopped thinking about it that way and really looked at it as more continuously over time, what we discovered is you do the simple math, you do not changing any of the physics or whatever, is that you realize these short-lived climate pollutants were playing in a very large role, much more so than people realized, and that, that was an invisible lever for reducing the rate of warming that we weren't taking advantage of.

So it's not changing -- as I said before, it's not changing the importance of getting rid of CO2 emissions, but it's also that we need to do both. Historically, people said, well, we can do that because they're short-lived and they go away quickly once you stop emitting them, we can do that at any point in time.

But in fact, that's not true because they're driving so much of it now. If we wait to do it later, the problem gets much worse, and we've exacerbated the problem and the damages are greater. If we do that methane emissions reductions now, we get much more benefit.

Esther Whieldon

Right. We start hitting more of those tipping points.

Steven Hamburg

Yes. And I don't even think so much about tipping points anymore. I try to think about it, we have feedbacks. We're already seeing that. I mean tipping points are obviously really scary, but we don't need to go to a tipping point. We're just getting feedbacks. As the world gets warmer and the water cycle, the hydrology changes, we're seeing more wildfires. Those wildfires put up not only greenhouse gases, but they're threatening lives.

We've seen it recently in Southern California. They're damaging billions, tens of billions of dollars of damage. These are enormous impacts. They are getting more intense because of climate change. We are -- there's no ambiguity. Now we can't say that all of it is related to climate change, but climate change is exacerbating the problem.

Similarly, the intensification of hurricanes, similarly, the increased floods, the increasing heat waves. And while some people want to say, "Oh, no. o, it's not." That data is very robust. That doesn't mean that it's only caused by that, but we're making the problem worse.

Dominic Watson

I would add, in addition to short-lived climate polls like methane emissions getting short shift in climate negotiations and some of the climate science, this is an issue that's been out of sight and out of mind for the industry. As you said, it's invisible. You can't see it. You can't smell it, and the only way to detect it is with advanced instruments, infrared instruments, MethaneSAT.

And for a long time, the industry has founded its data, its emissions data on what's called emissions factors, or essentially, desktop estimates, where they're going out counting the number of tanks that they have on site, the number of widgets they have, adding those up and getting an emissions estimate.

And time and time again, what's been shown by the science from Steven's team and other academic institutions is that, that dramatically underestimates and misallocates emissions. And so I think what we've seen -- what the upside is here is that with the technologies like MethaneSAT or handheld cameras, there's an opportunity to go out, find those emission sources and be able to go out and reduce them.

Steven Hamburg

And there's a real opportunity here because -- and we're seeing the industry respond, which is really wonderful, is when we started thinking about this problem and I started talking 15 years ago to various members of the industry, everyone would say, "Well, it's product. Why would we waste it?" That was a very standard line.

Esther Whieldon

In the natural gas, right? Yes.

Steven Hamburg

It's -- natural gas is largely methane, right? -- overwhelmingly methane. That's what you're selling, that's what you're producing. And as I pushed, it became clear to me that, in fact, folks didn't have the data.

They believe they wouldn't waste it. I really believe it was an honest belief, but they didn't have the data. They assumed all the systems were working as they should. Things were happening the way they thought they were, and in reality, that wasn't the case.

And once we started producing data and making these measurements, almost ubiquitously, there were surprises. There were -- people learned, companies learned that things were happening, they didn't realize were happening. The role of tank emissions, where people didn't realize how large they were.

Esther Whieldon

In tanks, this is like transport or…

Steven Hamburg

No, no, we're talking about on production side, storage tanks where you're storing liquids, it's gone through a separator. If you have liquids and gas production and you're trying to make sure you're getting the gas separate from the liquids. And if the pressure builds you have venting for safety. We want that. We don't want anything to explode, and these tanks have a lot more emissions than the early conversations we had.

Again, we were there, companies were there, so this is not pointing any fingers. We all said, "Oh, no, that shouldn't be the big part of it." And then we learned that fact, there was a much bigger part of the problem. That's why I'm a scientist, so I clearly love data. I believe in data. But the old adage, you can't manage what you don't measure, I think has a lot of truth.

And the bottom line is the data that was being used up until the last decade was all derived from a fairly limited campaign in the early '90s, generated these emission factors, you did everything on a calculation basis, and then you thought you understood what you had. But in reality, you had very little understanding of what was happening.

And that's really where we tried to work with the scientific community and the industry to provide much greater clarity. I like to talk about putting on better glasses and allowing us to see the problem clearly, which allows us in turn to be able to effectively manage it.

The key for the satellite is we needed to be able to do that on a global basis. We could do that here in the U.S. because it's not that hard to get permission to fly and to do other things, and we were able to collect data and collaboratively with the companies. We could go on a lot of sites. Again, we're doing this collaboratively, safely so that we could get a lot of data.

But we needed that data around the world. We didn't have enough scientists, enough money. We needed to do it. That's really the power of remote sensing is combining on the ground or aircraft-based with remote sensing, and then we can get a clearer picture. We can get a much more robust picture and we can do it in a more cost-effective way.

Esther Whieldon

Now what role, if at all, is AI playing or will it play in this issue in handling methane?

Steven Hamburg

So it's part of it. And it's -- I think we always have to be careful in these things, the hype versus reality. So we use AI techniques, but it's slow going, right? The promise is there. But we -- I also see times where people are making claims about what they can do with AI that just don't seem to bear out. So are we supportive? Absolutely. Do we deploy it? Absolutely. But it's not the dominant tool. We're not seeing it mainly. We still need to collect the primary data. We need to use physics. We need to be able to see the spectra.

You can't make that up. AI can't generate the data that doesn't exist. What it can help you do is analyze it and learn from it. Also, one of the challenges that we see is the industry varies dramatically across the globe. So what a pattern that might be true in one geography might be completely different in another geography. So when you're trying to train your different algorithms, that doesn't work so well because it's assuming what it saw over there applies to the next place, and in fact, it doesn't.

So what we're finding is that this is very geographically variable, and we have to be very careful because we can't transport that one learning necessarily straight over to another. And so we are always very cautious about that so that we don't overinterpret our data and then misunderstand, misrepresent what we're actually seeing.

Dominic Watson

I'll just add that the industry is already starting to address this without advanced tools like AI. There's companies large and small that have understood this problem and that have started to implement solutions within their operations to reduce emissions.

So a small operator out in Wyoming named Jonah up to ConocoPhillips are two of the companies, for example, that recently have received gold standard under the United Nations Oil and Gas Methane Partnership, which is a reporting framework that requires companies to go out and start measuring their emissions and therefore, having the tools to reduce them. So I think it's about taking the opportunities that are immediately available to operators and implementing rather than waiting for advanced technologies to come in.

Esther Whieldon

I have a quick follow-up question. Time line, what are you hearing from them in terms of when they expect to be able to address most of it for themselves?

Dominic Watson

So the targets that industry have been set are either for 2025 or for those that are maybe, a little later to the party, 2030. And those are, by and large, near zero targets. So achieving 0.2% methane intensity or less. And I think the question here is about how much we're going to address and when because there's a lot of low-hanging fruit that you can address within a year.

Steven Hamburg

And I just want to talk about the technology because we talked -- you asked about AI. So part of it is really how much the technology has changed. So when we started thinking about this about 13, 14 years ago, we realized that the companies had a need that they didn't have this data.

And the technology companies had technology, but they weren't providing products that were focused on that need. So we actually helped to organize with the companies and the technology companies, something we call the Methane Detector Challenge with the group that Dominic works at, internal to EDF.

And we said, look, we won't pay anyone to come, but we'll talk to the companies. They made a commitment to buy this technology if you could do it within certain standards. The oil and gas companies set standards where they said, "Well, if you could produce sensors that could meet these standards, we'll buy them because that will really help us." And then we went to technology companies, "We think you have the technology. We'll provide free third-party testing." And in fact, they brought many technologies came forward. We provided transparent testing.

Here's clear. Company started buying it. We then worked with Stanford University and Adam Brandt there to do a Mobile Monitoring challenge, similarly, to test the Mobile Monitoring. And then now he's working on other kinds of testing for controlled releases. The point is we help to jump start with the companies, with the technology companies, a whole new industry. And now there are lots of companies offering these services. None of them existed 12 years ago.

This was a whole new industry. And the point is it has responded. It's effective. There's diversity and you need diversity because you need different technology in different situations depending on what types of problems you have or what kind of scales you're at working on, et cetera.

Esther Whieldon

Yes. And so on our podcast, we hear time and time again about the importance of partnerships across sectors, across companies, across technologies. And that's really the way to leverage real change.

Steven Hamburg

Absolutely. And so we started the Methane Detector challenge. And then ARPA-E at Department of Energy, actually developed the MONITOR program where they put in about $30 million to create a competition to develop technology to monitor methane. And that's certainly one of their most successful programs, again, helping to catalyze this entire industry. So there, we have government participation. We have NGO participation.

We have private sector on both sides of that relationship, the technology providers and the oil and gas companies. I think that's the kind of catalytic role that we, as EDF like to play. I think it can be really important. It's also critical because we have this urgency.

And in this case, we have a real benefit, right? They're putting product back in the pipe, so it's not just reducing damages. You're actually increasing products, so that's where the cost-effectiveness, it's the low-hanging fruit. I actually like to talk about it. It's the fruit lying on the ground. It's not even on the tree anymore.

Dominic Watson

Every ton of methane emissions you take out of the air is not just pollutant that's taken out of the atmosphere, but it's also natural gas that doesn't have to be extracted out of the ground elsewhere. So there's a dual benefit.

Steven Hamburg

And I want to just add that I think there's a realization in the industry that good practice shouldn't include these emissions. And I can't help but think about safety. As the industry embraced the need to bring safety forward, right? You shouldn't have to suffer injuries in your employees if you're operating well. Accidents happen, but they really can be minimized. Well, it's no different with emissions.

We know that you can operate cleanly without these emissions. If you're operating well and managing well, these emissions should be very low, and that's the good standard. And that's what I'm seeing increasingly is a realization. This is an indication of how well you operate as a company, how well you operate as a site, and that is really a sea change.

And I certainly see a much wider range of companies embracing that. And that's even separate from climate. You're just wasting product. You're not operating cleanly, and that doesn't make a lot of sense.

Dominic Watson

I think what companies have started to understand is this is core to their long-term competitiveness in the energy transition. It's going to be a lot of really challenging questions for the industry over the next few decades. But over the next five years, we have a real opportunity to address one of the easy ones.

Esther Whieldon

So we just heard from Steven and Dominic, how EDF is working with companies, NGOs and academics to measure methane emissions and their sources. Dominic said there are cost-effective methods for stopping the vast majority of oil and gas industry methane emissions. At CERAWeek, I also talked with two big energy companies about how they're tackling methane emissions, ExxonMobil and EQT. We'll include a link in our show notes to those episodes in case you'd like to hear how they're approaching this issue.

Okay. Now let's turn to our next guest, Georges Tijbosch of MiQ, who works with major oil and gas companies to certify their methane emissions levels and reductions. Like Steven and Dominic, Georges said addressing methane emissions is the low-hanging fruit in the climate journey for oil and gas companies. Okay. Here's Georges, who starts by describing what MiQ does.

Georges Tijbosch

One of the reasons we are not-for-profit is because as a certifier, you need to have an independence of the companies that one is certifying. What we're doing is very similar of what one will have seen in other areas of business, for example, financial standards or health and safety standards. And in effect, what MiQ has created is standards protocols, methodologies, different words, more or less same meaning to look at the methane emissions of companies, but of their operated assets.

Esther Whieldon

So when you're working with companies, what kind of data are you asking for them? How are you sort of working to get the information? And how is that evolving?

Georges Tijbosch

So yes, I mean, in a way, it's complex and at the same time, it's also not complex. And the world is evolving. So what we know now is very different. We only started this in 2020. We spent, call it, a year or two in the proverbial laboratory designing, tinkering, thinking it through. And the first certifications happened early 2022. And we've now certified since then close to 20% of U.S. gas production, which equates to around 5% of global production.

So it's huge growth in that very short time. And over that period, we've seen things evolving, but the fundamental things what we saw a couple of years ago are still valid today. That is if you talk about technology, the amazing message is there are a lot of good technologies out there, and that can be drones. That can be laser-mounted towers with lasers on it scanning. That can be flyovers. That can be satellites, that can be handheld. There's a variety of technologies.

But what's very clear and what was clear five years ago as well, there is no silver bullet to this. So what you need is a combination of technologies in many cases. And what you also need one facility, one asset is not the same as another one because one might be in a mountainous region. The other one might be in a freezing region. The next one might be on the sea. Each of them has got different characteristics, and in some cases, you can use the drones. In other case, oops, it's a bit windy there.

So it's a bit more difficult and so on and so on. And so what we've done as well is to design our norms, our systems such that different technologies can work in that, and it's up to the operators and the technology companies to determine what works, and that is in a cost-effective way works as well is key. But we're not going to impose you must and you shall use this technology. We are absolutely an advocate of we want this market to thrive.

And we've seen that over the last couple of years, many of these companies, it's almost like children. We're seeing them growing, and that's really great to see some of these companies becoming more and more successful doing their next round of funding, for example, and we're seeing that clearly happening in this market.

So there's a lot of exciting technology around in that space. And also then there's the other part, it's not just the sensor kind of part. The output from some of these sensors is like petabytes coming out of there. It's like what do you do with that data?

Esther Whieldon

So I'm assuming that's a lot of data.

Georges Tijbosch

That's a lot of data. Yes. It's a lot of data coming out of some of them, and that needs to be amalgamated. And sometimes what you also see is the data coming out of the drone doing the fly over once a month might give a different overall result versus the handheld camera going there because they use different resolutions, frequencies and the basic two dimensions are geographical and temporal is kind of the equation that people are looking at.

So you need to ingurgitate all that data, crunch that data, combine that data. Reconciliation, it's called. So that's where the data platforms come in as well. So yes, there's a lot of innovation happening in this space. And as part of that we will find as good geeks, we find that very exciting that, that development is happening.

And I don't think that's going to stop for a while. But the good thing is the technologies are there. Now I'm now talking -- just to be clear as well, I'm talking about the measurement and monitoring technologies. Then there are also the technologies to abate, which is, for example, replacing compressors or changing the valves and all that technology is out there as well. And again, it comes back to a lot of these technologies are there. Yes, they need to grow. Yes, they need to scale. Yes, they need to get better, but it's all there.

That's why I find methane so exciting. This is a problem as a series of companies and whether it's the providers or whether it's the operators, we can solve the decades. I'm firmly convinced of that. I started saying that was it 2022 or something like that in a panel, I got asked when are we going to solve 2030. When everybody was still talking about 2050. It's like no, 2030.

Esther Whieldon

We can do this faster.

Georges Tijbosch

We can do way faster, let's say, the real target, a target that's within the lifetime of your average CEO because that's how decisions get made. 2050, that's five CEOs later in any company, and I don't think that's very effective. People are now talking about 2030 targets. And that's kind of galvanized people behind it. Is it going to be exactly 0 in 2030? Probably not, but are we on a massive road to solving it? Yes, I'm still convinced.

Esther Whieldon

So you say you do the certifications for the emissions. Is it that they're accounting for it correctly? Is it like is that the certification? So it's not the reduction side so much, right? It's more they -- are you actually counting it right?

Georges Tijbosch

Yes. So where we are starting from is by counting it right, we are then deriving as the next stage, the benchmark for these companies to improve. And we are seeing as part of the certification, we are giving a grading A, B, C, D. We've got a grading system. It's not different than when you buy a refrigerator, how energy efficient is that, at least in Europe, and I don't know if in the U.S., that's the case. But in Europe, we have a rating on the fridges when you buy that, A++, A+, and so on. It's almost the same with methane.

And what we've seen happening is that we had this one case where we had certified A companies or company's assets, a large company that had announced it. And in the meantime, we're in the process -- our auditor was in the process of certifying another company, which there were peers and competitors as it works. That company worked much harder for the next month or two to get the same grade as the other company.

And that's the kind of effect that we are looking for. And when buyers go and buy the gas, they want to get certified gas because at the moment, all the grades are pretty good. But the preference of the differentiation in the market is starting to happen. And again, that's where basically, market forces will drive the change.

And even within a company, so one of the companies we're working with, one of the three pillars we have in our protocols is around the policies, how you manage methane. What does management say? How do you talk about it? How do you address it? Or that company is using -- we've got a ranking system for that, which is part of the grading there. What they're now doing, they're using that as benchmark and they're internally going like, look, next year, I want to be a bit better, and I'm going to look at that and that.

And so what that gives the companies is clear goals to work towards. It's almost like a metric. Whilst otherwise, what we've seen in the past is, yes, there's a lot of documentation on methane, how you should do methane and you find a 20-pager explanation here or scientific research. Where do you start?

Life is too short for companies. They want clarity. And so now they can work towards what's the next level. At MiQ, we're not imposing where they've got to be. It's like markets will sort that out, and markets will sort that out as partially voluntary markets and partially what we call regulation coming through.

Esther Whieldon

Are you getting a sense from anybody that they're taking the foot off the pedal on dealing with methane? Is it less -- becoming less of a priority for them?

Georges Tijbosch

The short answer is no. it's a clear no. I'm not hearing that from anybody. To the contrary, I hear companies. I hear industry associations saying, "Look, we've started on this path. It makes total sense. We can do this. We keep going." And we want other companies to join. We want, for example, the next stage is also, for example, the NOCs, national oil companies to join. I know of many large international companies that are still in the land of wanting to help them getting faster on the learning curve from all the learnings that have happened here.

They've learned here over the last 10 years, 10, 15 years. And well, let's kind of spread that knowledge to the companies that are starting with this because ultimately, the key is there as well, coming back to this, the methane issues overall are very -- why not help other people in the industry to clean that up as well. And I don't think I have mentioned that, but the total number, if you run that, is 7 billion tonnes, which is the equivalent of all the emissions, methane emissions in oil and gas are the equivalent of all the cars on the road.

That's the price here. So finding a solution for all the cars on the road, that's complicated. Even if we're into all EV cars, that's a lot of batteries and cars that need to be done. We still then need to have them all on renewable energy as well. So that's a complex one. That's not a three-year horizon, clearly. Whilst this year, the same amount of greenhouse gas emissions is limited to the oil and gas industry. existing technologies, practices have been developed. So that's why we're very upbeat about this can be done.

Esther Whieldon

I ask Georges, whether this issue is being addressed by all types of companies, including those that are state-owned.

Georges Tijbosch

The leaders amongst this are the international and large companies. One, they've got international exposure. So they're also exposed in areas and countries where, let's say, for example, Europe, where this is a more important subject, but also they've got shareholders and banks that are looking at them or investors.

So there's the capital markets that play a big role in that. Then on the other side of the equation, what one has is, for example, what I call the NOCs, national oil companies.

And it's a slightly more complicated discussion there. And one of the people we speak with is she always explains it really nicely is like well, for a lot of those companies, they are more or less the country because the revenue coming from these NOCs is a big part of the taxation GDP of that country. And so yes, they can deal with that, but there are a couple of subtleties that intervene in there, which is, for example, for them, every dollar they're going to spend on doing this is a dollar that's not going to their population.

And so it creates other dynamics in those kind of areas. And obviously, they're managed very differently generally. They don't have -- the shareholder is the government. not quoted on the stock market. So it's very different pressures. But some of them are equally leading on this. I don't know, for example, PETRONAS, they are doing a lot on this as well, for example, as a national oil company. And some of the other ones like in the Middle East are managing a lot of this.

But then equally, there are companies where there's a lot to be done. But again, I think that's where partnerships are helping those kind of companies to get up the learning curve basically. Again, 10 years ago, methane was not very known. So we started about five years ago after a career in the city, I've kind of retired and then former colleague, she called me back to talk about methane. And my first reaction was 2020, call it, not long ago, just before COVID, actually. "Let's look at methane." And I'm like, "Methane, you mean gas?" And she's like, "Yes, the leaks." I'm like, "What?"

And I've worked in the industry mainly on trading for about 20 years. And what's the issue? Well, there's leaks. It's like are there. And I'm pretty environmentally conscious and things like that. And we tried to run the numbers. And at that time, five years ago only, there was hardly any articles on methane. And so I remember in the early days when we started that was first to get our head around how big is this problem, which is a typical banking thing, how big is this? Is it worth the effort? It became quite quickly.

Yes, it's absolutely worth it, which is why I started this at that time, be interested on it. And so those first years, I was doing mainly advocacy, educating people on why methane, how big is this problem? And yes, we can do it. Now -- or apart from what I just did here now, we are not having to explain too much about methane anymore. Like I speak to a 10-year-old, they might even have heard about methane.

Esther Whieldon

Earlier in this episode, we heard Steven of EDF say that we must address both methane and carbon emissions from the oil and gas industry. I ask Georges for his perspective on this. Here's what he said.

Georges Tijbosch

Yes. So I think one needs to separate those two issues almost is the issue of dealing with methane emissions in the production of oil and gas and including the CO2 emissions, by the way, the transport of or liquefaction that creates CO2 emissions. So the Scope 1 or 2 emissions they're called in the industry, honestly, that is the equivalent of at the time, the chemical industry dumping whatever into the river.

That's the industry can and should solve that, okay? The second part is the consumption of these products. That is a much one that's a more complex one to deal with. And now there are many more parties involved as well on that one. So I think that is a -- let's call it, the energy transition. It's a different challenge versus solving methane.

Esther Whieldon

Something they can handle versus they need buy-in from others more so?

Georges Tijbosch

You need buy-in from others. We might need new technologies, for example. We might need low-priced technologies, for example, as well. And I think the key here is that often there has been a focus on trying to almost like stop the supply of that -- but there is a couple of good cases that happened recently, unfortunately, where we did stop the supply.

Esther Whieldon

With Russia and…

Georges Tijbosch

Exactly. And see what happens. So -- and that was 3% of global gas supply only of gas. Oil kept flowing. Coal kept flowing. So call it 1% or 2% of global fossil fuel supply. And the prices in Europe multiplied by 10. Europe would not have afforded that for many years. Now that was an abrupt shock.

Esther Whieldon

But it's an indication.

Georges Tijbosch

It's an indication. This -- and so when I see these -- some of these scenarios that straight lining it down to whatever, 2050, 2060, yes, it's great in a graph, but it's not the real world. And I'm a pragmatist, you need to think about the real world. I want the impact, not just theory. And so even -- so Russia was that, call it, 1% or 2% of global gas supply. And some of these -- let's go to net zero. They were diminishing 3%, 4%, 5% per year, okay?

So what you need in my view, you need to have alternatives, and that's windmills, solar farms, small-scale nuclear, blue hydrogen, blue ammonia and so on and so on, batteries, EVs, that's what's going to create the energy transition, just asking for it to stop. I'm not necessarily in that camp that's going to be effective. However, addressing the methane emissions in the oil and gas, yes, that's got to stop, and we can address that. So I think you need to separate those two out basically.

Esther Whieldon

Today, we heard about advances in measuring and monitoring methane, which have unlocked energy companies' ability to understand and address those emissions. And we heard that despite the scale of the problem, solving it is largely cost effective for companies and can be done with existing technologies in the next five years.

Lindsey Hall

We also heard how companies have multiple incentives for addressing methane emissions. It gives them a way to make progress toward their overall climate targets while also reducing how much natural gas they're losing through leaks.

But at the same time, as Steven said, the world needs to make progress on carbon emissions as well. We can't address one and ignore the other, and we heard Georges say at the end there that he's a pragmatist about the energy transition. That's an idea we heard across CERAWeek interviews and in other conversations we've been having on this podcast in 2025.

Esther Whieldon

And please stay tuned as next week, we'll be back with more coverage of methane emissions. This time with a focus on how to address the problem of leaks at abandoned oil and gas wells.

Lindsey Hall

Thanks for tuning into this episode of All Things Sustainable. If you like what you heard, please subscribe, share, and leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts.

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