Using new geospatial data and 2020 fossil fuel methane emissions for the Global Fuel Exploitation Inventory (GFEI) v3

Abstract. The Global Fuel Exploitation Inventory (GFEI) is a global 0.1° x 0.1° resolution gridded inventory of methane emissions from oil, gas, and coal exploitation. Here, we present GFEI v3 with updated national emissions to 2020 using reports submitted to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), leading to new global emissions of 23, 20, and 31 Tg a^-1 for oil, gas, and coal, respectively. We also use new geospatial information from the Oil and Gas Infrastructure Mapping database (OGIM v1) for spatial distribution of global oil-gas methane emissions. We use coal mine locations from the Global Energy Monitor’s Global Coal Mine Tracker (GCMT), combined with our own estimates for mine-level methane emissions, to distribute national emissions between coal mine locations. Our mine-level methane emission estimates use country specific emission factors for top producing countries supplemented with modeled emission factors based on coal mine depth and grade. We see the greatest change in the spatial distribution of emissions in GFEI v3 compared to v2 in China due to the use of GCMT for coal mine locations. Large point source plumes (super-emitters) observed by the NASA EMIT instrument are co-located with infrastructure identified in GFEI v3, but the magnitude of the measured emissions is poorly correlated with the gridded emissions in GFEI. This may reflect missing or misrepresented sources in GFEI v3 but also the sporadic nature of the super-emitter measurements used here. By aligning GFEI v3 with national UNFCCC reports and using state-of-the-science geospatial information, the inventory can be confronted with satellite observations of atmospheric methane through inverse modeling to evaluate and improve the UNFCCC reports. We plan to continue updating GFEI to align with reported national emissions and new geospatial information, including assessment of GFEI spatial accuracy through comparison to super-emitter detections. GFEI v3 emission grids by sector and subsector are available at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/HH4EUM (Scarpelli et al., 2024).