Invisible to the naked eye, undetectable by smell and 80 times more powerful than carbon dioxide for its short-term warming impact on the climate, methane is explosive, toxic and can make helicopters fall out of the sky.
Invisible to the naked eye, undetectable by smell and 80 times more powerful than carbon dioxide for its short-term warming impact on the climate, methane is explosive, toxic and can make helicopters fall out of the sky. It’s like something out of a superhero movie — or a bad dream.
Ari Pottens, Canadian campaign manager with the U.S.-based Environmental Defense Fund, said the federal framework is promising and sets a benchmark for B.C. regulations. The province will have to follow the federal regulations or sign what’s called an equivalency agreement with the federal government, he explained. The closer the respective regulations are to each other, the easier they are to enforce.
“Right now, in B.C. you only have to do a comprehensive inspection of facilities three times a year, but the new federal regulations are much more stringent,” Pottens said. “One of the things that would make sense would be to increase the level of [B.C.’s] inspection requirements, so that it more closely mirrors what the federal government has proposed.”
“Over the time since we’ve started to deal with methane, our ability to detect and measure it has vastly improved,” Tom Green, senior climate policy advisor with the David Suzuki Foundation, told The Narwhal in an interview. But much of the province’s accounting of methane emissions still relies on assumptions, rather than actual measurement and Green said implementing “large scale independent monitoring” would ensure B.C. has an accurate picture of the problem.A 2022 report by St.
The ministry confirmed its contract is with Montreal-based GHGSat, which already has six methane-detecting satellites orbiting the planet. MethaneSat, a collaboration between the Environmental Defense Fund and the New Zealand Space Agency, aims to launch its first later this year. The B.C. regulator said regulatory changes will apply to liquefaction facilities, including LNG Canada, pipelines and all upstream facilities. “There’s sort of a twofold piece on it,” he said. “Yes, patch the holes, fix the pumps and incomplete combustion at flare stacks — all these various ways that they’re looking at reducing methane emissions. But if they’re only pulling more of this stuff out of the ground, more of it is going to end up in the atmosphere all along the supply chain.
Domestic responsibility for methane is part of an international effort. According to the Global Methane Assessment, a 2021 report published by Climate and Clean Air Coalition and the United Nations Environment Programme, cutting global emissions by 45 per cent would save the planet from around 0.
According to Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency, “methane cuts are among the cheapest options to limit near-term global warming.”
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