Canadian oil producers resisting a cap on the sector’s pollution and asserting they’ve already addressed the “low-hanging fruit” of methane emissions could still achieve meaningful reductions with modest additional effort, suggests analysis by the Pembina Institute.
“The proposed level of the emissions cap, as our modeling from earlier this year shows, can be largely met through a combination of methane reductions—which will mostly come from the conventional sector, where methane mitigation solutions are well established—and deployment of carbon capture technology and some other measures in the oilsands,” Amanda Bryant, a senior analyst with the clean energy think tank, told The Energy Mix.
“While progress has been made on methane in the last couple of years, there are still several cost-effective solutions that companies can explore.”
Methane makes up around 13% of Canada’s total emissions, 40% of it coming from the oil and gas sector. On a global level, if the oil and gas sector addresses upstream methane, it could cut 4% of the world’s emissions, says McKinsey.
Canada recently released draft regulations to cap emissions from the oil and gas industry, requiring it to cut emissions by 35% below 2019 levels in the next six to eight years. Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault says about half of the emissions cuts to comply with the cap will come from reducing methane emissions, while oil and gas production will continue rising 16% by 2032.
But the regulations have been derided by the industry as effectively being a cap on production, arguing that the technologies needed to reduce emissions to the required levels while sustaining production are not available. Speaking to the Globe and Mail recently, Chris Carlsen, CEO of oil and gas producer Birchcliff Energy, said he doesn’t see how Guilbeault’s expectations could be met.
“We have made quite a significant improvement on methane emissions,” Carlsen said.
Referring to Birchcliff’s operations, Carlsen said he wasn’t sure how to reduce methane further because possible options—like flaring and venting—were already only done as needed for safety and to run the plant. He added that meeting half of the emissions cap by cutting methane is “just unrealistic.”
“Can we do more with technology and continue to be more efficient? Yes, and we always want to work on that, but I don’t see a lot of low-hanging fruit.”
But in a recent post for Pembina, Bryant suggests oil producers may have overlooked some other cost-effective opportunities to reduce methane emissions. Carlsen did not reply to The Mix to confirm whether he had considered these approaches in his comments.
According to Bryant, some opportunities include further addressing emissions from pneumatic devices that are a “well-known and historically significant source of methane emissions,” addressing venting in Saskatchewan—which has a high methane loss rate because the province lacks infrastructure to capture and route gas—as well as overall improvements in flare performance and integrating enclosed combustion. Several other opportunities include better leak monitoring, improved facility design, and using satellites to trigger responses to large leak events.
Bryant clarified that Pembina had not modelled how these various pathways could affect the oil and gas sector’s emissions if they were implemented. But past modelling shows the emissions reductions they think are possible.
