- Emissions up to 87,251kg per hour, or 764,319 tonnes per year, recorded
- 13 simultaneous leaks seen at Raspadskya Mine on 14th January 2022 with further plumes observed on 22nd January and 27th May
- One of the biggest ‘ultra emission’ events ever traced to a verified source
June 15th, 2022, Montreal – On 14th January 2022, GHGSat, the world leader in high-resolution methane monitoring from space, detected the biggest emission from an individual facility it has ever seen: nearly 90 tonnes of methane (CH4) being released, every hour, from the Raspadskya Mine, in Kemerovo Oblast, Russia.
13 distinct methane plumes were measured during a single satellite pass, ranging in size from 658 to 17,994 kg/h. If the total rate of release were sustained over the course of a year, the mine would emit 764,319 tonnes of methane – enough to power 2.4m homes and equivalent to the CO2 produced by 5 average-sized coal-fired power stations1. Subsequent observations suggest the underground mine consistently expels large quantities of the gas, which has a climate-warming potential c.84 times greater than CO2 over 20 years.
The releases may be safety-related. Methane is an unavoidable by-product of mining, with pockets of the gas released as seams are opened. In May 2010, 66 people were killed at Raspadskya, Russia’s largest mine, in an explosion and collapse caused by a build-up of methane within its 220 miles of tunnels2. GHGSat has alerted the mine’s operators to its findings.
The scale of the Raspadskya emissions exceeds that of any previous, directly attributable ‘ultra emission’ event. In October 2015, the largest man-made methane release in US history occurred at an underground natural gas storage facility in Aliso Canyon, near Porter Ranch, Los Angeles. Estimates put the rate of release as high as 58 tons per hour3. The carbon footprint of the leak, which took four months to fix, was greater than that of the Deepwater Horizon disaster2.
Three years later, GHGSat identified a malfunctioning oil well in Turkmenistan while on a scientific mission to find mud volcanoes. Between February 2018 and January 2019 this released c.142,000 tonnes of CH44. Coverage of the event raised global awareness of the threat posed by human-made methane emissions.
More recently, GHGSat was the first to definitively measure emissions from open cast coal mines from space, a source that has traditionally proven challenging to quantify. Their satellites recorded an open cast facility in Kazakhstan generating 54,000 kg/hr of the gas during passes in January and February this year.
Central Asia was also cited as a major methane emitter in a paper published in February 2022, analyzing data collected by the Sentinel 5P satellite from 2019 – 20. The study identified regional ‘hot spots’ across North Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere, releasing up to 500 tonnes of methane per hour5.
GHGSat’s new observations build on this work and previous studies. Thanks to the unique, high-resolution instruments on board the company’s six satellites, which can image down to just 25m x 25m on the ground, researchers can now pinpoint the exact source of methane leaks. Emission rates too can be precisely measured, as the sensor’s accuracy has been validated in third-party blind experiments involving controlled releases of methane. This data can play a vital role in helping mine operators better understand their emissions and prioritize coal mine methane (CMM) capture projects.
References
- Methane emission equivalencies: https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gas-equivalencies-calculator
- Raspadskya Mine Explosion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspadskaya_mine_explosion
- Aliso Canyon event: https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/sites/d…
- Turkmenistan event: https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottcarpenter/2019/11/27/detection-of-methane-leak-from-space-could-herald-a-revolution/?sh=4c506f43667c
- Public data finds ‘ultra emitters’: https://www.sciencenews.org/ar…
