Methane Emissions Measurement Campaign Results for the Appalachian Methane Initiative

Key Findings of the Report Include:

• The average methane emission intensity across all surveyed AMI production and midstream facilities was 0.064% and 0.099%, respectively, consistent with other studies that showed the Appalachian basin is the lowest emitting major oil and gas-producing basin in the US.
• Coal mines exhibit the highest average emissions per site of any surveyed facility types, measured on average to be 450 kg/h per site, or almost two orders of magnitude larger than O&G sites in the Appalachian basin.
• Methane emission rates of large release events (any observed instantaneous emissions over 100 kg/h) observed across 88 coal mine sources are consistently larger than those observed across 6,000+ O&G sources.
• There is no statistically significant difference observed between emissions from AMI and non-AMI O&G sources on an equipment-level basis.
• Equipment-level analyses help identify actionable information for emission mitigation. Detectable emissions varied across equipment – only 6% of tanks, 1% wells, 2 to 3% of separators and dehydrators, and 13 to 15% of flares are found to be emitting from production sites in each survey.
• Consistent causal analysis can significantly improve the accuracy of measurement-informed inventories and enable predictive methane management.