Ground-Based Mobile Measurements to Track Urban Methane Emissions from Natural Gas in 12 Cities across Eight Countries
article
Vogel, F.
Ars, S.
Wunch, D.
Lavoie, J.
Gillespie, L.
Maazallahi, H.
Röckmann, T.
Nęcki, J.
Bartyzel, J.
Jagoda, F.
Lowry, D.
France, J.
Fernandez, J.
Bakkaloglu, S.
Fisher, R.
Lanoiselle, M.
Chen, H.
Oudshoorn, M.
Yver-Kwok, C.
Defratyka, S.
Morgui, J.A.
Estruch, C.
Curcoll, R.
Grossi, C.
Chen, J.
Dietrich, F.
Forstmaier, A.
Denier van der Gon, H.A.C.
Dellaert, S.N.C.
Salo, J.
Corbu, M.
Iancu, S.S.
Tudor, A.S.
Scarlat, A.I.
Calcan, A.
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.
TNO Identifier
1002684
Source
Environmental Science and Technology, 58, pp. 2271-2281.
Pages
2271-2281
Files
To receive the publication files, please send an e-mail request to TNO Repository.