Title
A high-resolution gridded inventory of coal mine methane emissions for India and Australia
Author
Sadavarte, P.
Pandey, S.
Maasakkers, J.D.
van der Gon, H.D.
Houweling, S.
Aben, I.
Publication year
2022
Abstract
Coal mines are globally an important source of methane and also one of the largest point sources of methane. We present a high resolution 0.1° × 0.1° bottom-up gridded emission inventory for methane emissions from coal mines in India and Australia, which are among the top five coal producing countries in 2018. The aim is to reduce the uncertainty in local coal mine methane emissions and to improve the spatial localization to support monitoring and mitigation of these emissions. For India, we improve the spatial allocation of the emissions by identifying the exact location of surface and underground coal mines and we use a tier-2 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) methodology to estimate the emissions from each coal mine using country-specific emission factors. For Australia, we estimate the emission for each coal mine by distributing the state-level reported total emissions using proxies of coal production and the coal basin-specific gas content profile of underground mines. Comparison of our total coal mine methane emission from India with existing global inventories showed our estimates are about a factor 3 lower, but well within range of the national Indian estimate reported to United nations framework convention on climate change (UNFCCC). For both the countries, the new spatial distribution of the emissions show large difference from the global inventories. Our improved emissions dataset will be useful for air quality or climate modelling and while assessing the satellite methane observation.
Subject
Coal mine
Emission inventory
Methane
Surface mine
Underground mine
Environment & Sustainability
Urbanisation
To reference this document use:
http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:de333456-8482-404a-9268-d8c333471d89
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1525/elementa.2021.00056
TNO identifier
972668
Publisher
University of California Press
ISSN
2325-1026
Source
Elementa, 10 (10), 1-34
Document type
article