Coverage
Does the tracker include all methane observations?
As of September 2024,tracker provides up-to-date methane emissions estimates for coal mines and natural gas transmission pipelines within GEM’s databases. For oil and gas extraction areas, GEM has associated assets from the latest release of the Global Oil and Gas Extraction Tracker to the analogous asset it falls within inside of Climate TRACE’s dataset. This is not always possible owing to areas where GOGET fields are either defined more granularly or otherwise incompatibly with TRACE oil and gas fields. This association process also aided estimations of potential emissions from oil and gas reserves.
For remotely-sensed plume attributions, GEM has focused on CarbonMapper’s publicly available methane observations that have not been attributed by either the Environmental Defense Fund’s PermianMAP project, or in published academic literature (as in California plumes analyzed by Rafiq et al., 2020). As of September 2024, this includes all observations taken by May 14th, 2023 from the plane-based AVIRIS-NG and Global Airborne Observatory instruments in Louisiana and the Western Gulf, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Texas (non-Permian). For California, we have analyzed just the plume observations made between 2020-2022, as prior years have been attributed by Rafiq et al., 2020. In addition, GEM has analyzed all CarbonMapper global methane plumes which are located within 10.5 km of a GEM coal mine, bioenergy plant, oil or gas plant, hydropower plant, coal plant, coal mine, or LNG terminal which were observed by the satellite as of March 29th, 2024. Future iterations will include more global attributions and methane sources.
Improving the Tracker
What if I find an error or a missing project?
Please fill out an error report here.
Credits
Who built this tool?
The tracker was designed and produced by Global Energy Monitor.
The following people contributed to research: Sara Fatimah, Claire Pitre, Charmaine Dalisay, Jeanette Lim, Mingxin Zhang, Ryan Driskell Tate, Dorothy Lan Mei, Wynn Feng, and Sarah Lerman Sinkoff. The project manager is Sarah Lerman Sinkoff.
How do I cite the data?
Please refer to the Download Data page for citation guidance.