On Monday, May 13, Yasir Naqvi, Member of Parliament Ottawa Centre, announced a $2-million investment from Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) to fund Carleton University researcher Matthew Johnson’s methane emissions inventory work.
The announcement kicked off the first day of the 2024 CanCH4 Symposium – Methane by the Numbers, a technical meeting to share research and measurement data on methane emissions to support Faster & Further, Canada’s National Methane Strategy.
Johnson’s Energy and Emissions Research Lab, a national hub for the study of methane, is collecting vital data to help Canada meet its ambitious target of reducing 75 per cent of all methane emissions, which is currently about 13 per cent of Canada’s total greenhouse gas inventory.
“Johnson is pioneering new innovative technologies to accelerate methane emissions reductions,” said Rafik Goubran, Vice-President (Research and International). “His research project is pivotal in addressing global rising temperatures and climate change”.
The multimillion-dollar project, entitled “National Methane Census to Drive Mitigation, Guide Regulation, Improve Reporting, and Verify Success (Western Canada)”, examines aircraft-based methane emissions. The emissions are measured at key oil and gas facilities throughout Western Canada and combined with comprehensive ground-based insights and world-leading analytics.
The project aims to address the critical lack of accurate, timely, source-resolved methane emissions data that are essential to the mitigation, regulation, intensity validation, and tracking of oil and gas sector methane emissions.
“This additional funding will enable my team to extend the project’s aerial methane surveys, by increasing the number of aerial measurements,” said Johnson. “We will target an additional 11,000 sites across Western Canada, bringing the total to over 20,000 sites”.
Results from the surveys will help identify site-level and aggregate mitigation opportunities, produce source-resolved measurement-based inventories, and directly support regulatory and policy decisions to mitigate methane emissions from the oil and gas industry.
Learn more about Matthew Johnson’s methane census.