Politics and technology are pushing oil firms to cut methane
wetlands, are natural. At COP28, though, the focus will be on oil-and-gas companies. Their methane emissions are seen as some of the lowest-hanging fruit, for three reasons.
A clutch of technologies have made it easier to measure them. Politicians are increasingly keen to cut them. And that combination of pressure and possibility has begun to change minds even among oil-industry bosses.
With help from America and the EU Sultan al-Jaber, COP28’s Emirati president, hopes to forge an ambitious deal on methane on the sidelines of the main talks. To see what might be possible, look to Stavanger, a city of quaint wooden houses that is the capital of Norway’s oil-and-gas industry. The country shares the hydrocarbon-rich North Sea with Britain, Denmark and the Netherlands.
Yet greenhouse-gas emissions from Norwegian oil and gas are only a third of what they are in Britain. In 1971 Norway’s government banned the routine “flaring"—or burning—of natural gas, which is mostly methane, from rigs in its area of the North Sea. Although burning methane turns it into carbon dioxide and water, a good deal of flared methane escape unburned, meaning the ban drove down emissions of both gases.
Newer rules have forced Equinor, Norway’s state-owned oil company, to continue cleaning up (see chart 2). Some of its offshore platforms receive electricity from land, removing the need to burn gas onboard to provide it. The firm is even developing dedicated offshore wind-farms to power its rigs.
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