Peo­ple of­ten think that CO2 is the on­ly green­house gas (GHG) which con­tributes to glob­al warm­ing and cli­mate change. How­ev­er, there are oth­er im­por­tant GHGs such as methane (CH4) and ni­trous ox­ide (N2O) which are al­so tracked un­der glob­al cli­mate agree­ments and which coun­tries re­port un­der their in­ter­na­tion­al oblig­a­tions un­der the Paris cli­mate agree­ment.

In Jan­u­ary 2025, the T&T Bi­en­ni­al Trans­paren­cy Re­port, was pub­lished on the Unit­ed Na­tions Frame­work Con­ven­tion for Cli­mate Change web­site and it shares some de­tails on the emis­sions in T&T. The green­house gas in­ven­to­ry, in­clud­ed with­in the re­port, iden­ti­fies the prin­ci­pal emit­ting sec­tors and the emit­ted gas­es. Last week, we re­port­ed on the ma­jor emit­ting sec­tors, while this graph shows the ma­jor gas­es emit­ted.

In ad­di­tion to CO2 emis­sions, T&T al­so emits sig­nif­i­cant vol­umes of methane and small vol­umes of ni­trous ox­ide.

Methane is recog­nised as one of the most im­por­tant gas­es im­pact­ing cli­mate. Methane is sig­nif­i­cant­ly more ef­fec­tive at trap­ping heat and has a 28 to 36 times greater glob­al warm­ing po­ten­tial than CO2​.

Over a 20-year time scale, this po­ten­cy jumps to ap­prox­i­mate­ly 80 to 86 times greater. This means that even small amounts of methane can have a sub­stan­tial warm­ing ef­fect.

Methane in T&T comes from a num­ber of sources in­clud­ing the en­er­gy sec­tor, waste sec­tor and the agri­cul­tur­al sec­tor.

In the en­er­gy sec­tor, methane is some­times lost through fugi­tive emis­sions which are un­in­ten­tion­al or un­con­trolled re­lease in­to the at­mos­phere. This can hap­pen from old pipelines and equip­ment such as valves, stor­age tanks etc. In oth­er in­stances, methane can be vent­ed for safe­ty rea­sons with planned re­leas­es to re­lieve pres­sure in the sys­tem or for main­te­nance op­er­a­tions.

In T&T, sev­er­al com­pa­nies are ac­tive­ly work­ing to­ward re­port­ing and man­ag­ing methane emis­sions through the Oil & Gas Methane Part­ner­ship (OGMP) as part of the Unit­ed Na­tions En­vi­ron­ment Pro­gramme (UN­EP). This al­lows as­set man­agers to di­rect­ly de­ploy cap­i­tal ef­fi­cient­ly to­wards emis­sion re­duc­tion, and al­lows in­vestors, reg­u­la­tors and oth­er stake­hold­ers to cred­i­bly dif­fer­en­ti­ate per­for­mance on an emis­sions ba­sis.

Lo­cal­ly, NGC, Her­itage Pe­tro­le­um and At­lantic be­long to the part­ner­ship in ad­di­tion to bp, EOG, Shell and Wood­side in­ter­na­tion­al of­fices.

There are some chal­lenges to re­duc­ing methane emis­sions.

In Trinidad in par­tic­u­lar, there are many ma­nure fields and ag­ing equip­ment which leak methane but they are in re­mote lo­ca­tions and spread over far dis­tances, mak­ing it dif­fi­cult to iden­ti­fy and se­quester.

The cap­ture of fugi­tive methane emis­sions from these re­mote fields presents a dual op­por­tu­ni­ty: re­duc­ing GHG emis­sions and pro­vid­ing a valu­able feed­stock for the down­stream petro­chem­i­cal in­dus­try. Sim­i­lar op­por­tu­ni­ties ex­ist for methane gen­er­at­ed in land­fills.

Tech­nol­o­gy is poised to play a cru­cial role in methane emis­sion man­age­ment. Ad­vanced re­mote mon­i­tor­ing sys­tems can de­tect and man­age emis­sions, while satel­lite im­agery of­fers a pow­er­ful tool for vi­su­al­is­ing leaks and pin­point­ing lo­ca­tions re­quir­ing in­ter­ven­tion.

Iden­ti­fy­ing and im­ple­ment­ing ro­bust fis­cal in­cen­tives are crit­i­cal to stim­u­late the nec­es­sary in­vest­ment in these ad­vanced tech­nolo­gies and dri­ve sig­nif­i­cant progress in methane emis­sion re­duc­tion.