Nord Stream, unprecedented methane leak: we reckon for the environment

In comparison, Nord Stream’s losses are much more concentrated, as they occurred within a few days. GHGSat, a satellite emissions monitoring company, said the leaks could have resulted in the leakage of 500 tons of methane per hour, ten times more than the Aliso leak at its peak.

Despite the scale of this climate disaster, the gas leak from Nord Stream is a minor incident compared to the daily leaks from global gas infrastructure, where about one-tenth of the fossil fuel supply is lost to the atmosphere.

“It’s a little bubble in the ocean of fugitive methane emitted every day around the world in mining, from fracking to coal and oil extraction,” said Dave Reay, director of the Edinburgh Climate Change Institute. Lauri Myllyvirta, an analyst at the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air, estimated that it is roughly comparable to the amount of methane leaking out of Russia’s oil and gas infrastructure in any one working week.

Out of control emissions

Global methane emissions are growing at an alarming rate, so much so that in 2020 they hit a record 596 million tons per year, according to the Global Methane Budget, about 50 million more than at the beginning of the century. More than half of global methane emissions come from human activities in three sectors: fossil fuel infrastructure (35%), agriculture and livestock (40%), waste landfills (20%), according to a recent Unep-Climate and Clean report Air Coalition.

The gas infrastructures in Europe are responsible for significant losses of methane into the atmosphere, due to breakdowns, poor maintenance of the plants or the practice of venting, which consists in the voluntary and controlled emission of gas from production and storage sites. .