Guest Editorial: Spinach in Your Teeth: How the Hyper-Transparency of Methane Emissions Data Will Impact the Oil and Gas Industry

This guest editorial addresses how the methane data landscape is changing as new organizations expand emissions monitoring efforts and seek to put the information to work.

The truth of the matter is that there is much about the oil and gas industry’s methane emissions that isn’t especially new. We’ve been hearing for years that methane is considered the second-most-harmful greenhouse gas overall after CO2, that methane is 28–80 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas, and that the oil and gas sector continues to be responsible for a large fraction of the world’s methane emissions.

Despite an impressive amount of attention being paid to this topic throughout the SPE and the industry over the past decade, the International Energy Agency estimates that the oil and gas sector (upstream and downstream combined) emitted over 81 million metric tons of methane in 2025, which translates to over 21% of the total methane emissions that can be attributed to human activity during that timeframe. But let’s be honest: As confronting as these numbers might be, many oil and gas industry insiders were largely aware of them already.

And many of the technologies being used to track methane aren’t all that new, either. Satellites have been used to monitor and measure methane emissions around the world for at least 10 years. It has also been possible for quite some time to augment intelligence from satellites with data sets from other collection methods and technologies— including aircraft, drones, ground-based systems, and continuous monitors—to create a joined-up, detailed understanding of what is happening with regard to methane emissions almost everywhere in the world. However, as technologically impressive as they are, most of these capabilities also don’t come as a total surprise to the oil and gas industry.

But a change is underway that will very likely prove to be materially important to the sector, and that will definitely be worthy of its attention.