MEthane Tracking Emissions Reference (METER): A global database of methane-emitting infrastructure

Abstract. Methane (CH₄) is the most important anthropogenic greenhouse gas for warming after carbon dioxide (CO₂). Methane is also more potent than CO₂ ton for ton, with a global warming potential (GWP) > 80-times higher than CO₂ over the first two decades after release and ~30-times greater over a century. Currently, approximately 160 countries and the European Union are attempting to reduce global methane emissions through the Global Methane Pledge. Accurate assessments of methane emissions are needed to track progress and verify emission reductions. Satellites are one of the tools being used to do this work, but satellites require accurate counts and locations of infrastructure types for tasking their imagers. Here, we introduce the first version of the MEthane Tracking Emissions Reference (METER) database. METER is a publicly available, global database of methane-emitting infrastructure, designed as a platform to be updated with new datasets identified by users. We combined public datasets and machine-learning (ML) identifications based on satellite imagery. We processed public databases of a given infrastructure type, using the collected databases as training and validation data to ML models on multiple sources of remotely sensed data to detect infrastructure globally. This synergy of ML with earth observation enabled a substantial increase in the completeness of multiple types of facilities represented in METER. It contains more than 12.3 million locations of methane-emitting infrastructure in more than 200 countries globally. The locations represent most major methane-emitting infrastructure types, from the fossil fuel industry (including oil and gas wells and wellpads, pipelines, refineries, terminals, and compressor stations) and from additional methane-emitting sources that include landfills, power plants, and coal mines. For some infrastructure types, most of the locations were made using ML. These determinations include to our knowledge the first global estimate of landfill locations (~13,000 landfills >2.5-ha in size), three-quarters of which came from ML approaches, storage tanks on oil and gas well pads (100 % ML determinations for both storage tanks and well pad determinations). We identified >170,000 new well pads globally, including ~40,000 well pads in Russia, one of the world’s largest oil and gas producers, where to our knowledge no prior sources or public data existed previously. METER is already playing an important role in satellite tracking of methane emissions, providing satellite providers with infrastructure locations such as landfills to track. It should also prove useful for updating bottom-up inventories of methane emissions through more accurate infrastructure counts or “activity factors.”