DUBAI – Oil and gas companies, governments and philanthropy have announced a flurry of pledges at the COP28 climate talks in Dubai to tackle methane, one of the most potent greenhouse gases whose emissions scientists say need to be urgently checked to reduce the threat from global warming.

The announcements, while generally earning praise, were also greeted with scepticism by civil society, which fears the voluntary pledges tackle only emissions from oil and gas production and not the much greater proportion of emissions created when oil and gas are burned by consumers.

Methane is the main component of natural gas and can leak from oil and gas drilling sites, pipelines and processing plants. Many of the leaks go undetected.

The gas is a major concern because in the first 20 years after release to the atmosphere, it is 86 times more powerful than carbon dioxide in trapping heat in the atmosphere. And emissions are rising.

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), methane is responsible for around 30 per cent of the rise in global temperatures since the industrial revolution.

At a media briefing for an initiative supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies and announced at COP28 on Dec 2, US Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry said: “There’s no way to keep the earth’s temperature at 1.5 deg C if we’re not focused, super-focused on methane now.”

More than 150 nations have now signed up to the voluntary Global Methane Pledge, an initiative launched in 2021 at COP26 in Glasgow, with the aim of cutting global methane emissions by 30 per cent by 2030.

Achieving this would be the equivalent of cutting all the emissions from cars, trucks and planes in the world, Mr Kerry said.

Wetlands, farm animals, rice cultivation and landfills also emit methane, but tackling the emissions from the oil and gas sector is regarded as an affordable and quick way to fight global warming.

“It’s the easiest, quickest, cheapest, simplest form of reducing what’s happening within the climate crisis,” said Mr Kerry, pointing to better monitoring and maintenance of pipelines, halting flaring and venting of excess gas.

At a separate event, Mr Kerry said more than U$1 billion (S$1.33 billion) in grant financing has been raised by the United States, European Union and philanthropic donations in the past year to help slash methane emissions, with the money mainly focused on helping low and middle-income countries.

The United Arab Emirates (UAE), COP28 host, said it will contribute US$100 million to a World Bank fund for grants to help reduce the release of methane by national oil companies in developing countries.

The Biden administration also unveiled final regulations that would target US oil and gas industry releases of methane.

The US Environmental Protection Agency said in a statement that the policies would ban routine flaring of natural gas produced by newly drilled oil wells; require oil companies to monitor for leaks from well sites and compressor stations; and establish a programme to use third-party remote sensing to detect large methane releases from so-called “super emitters”.

In a separate initiative, the COP28 UAE Presidency and Saudi Arabia launched the Oil and Gas Decarbonisation Charter, involving 50 companies representing more than 40 per cent of global oil production.

Signatories have committed to net-zero operations by 2050 at the latest, and ending routine flaring by 2030, and near-zero upstream methane emissions. Upstream refers to drilling and oil and gas extraction.

The signatories include BP, ENI, Saudi Aramco, Shell, Pertamina of Indonesia, Petronas of Malaysia and Australia’s Woodside Energy Group.

Another key concern is holding companies accountable for their pledges and monitoring progress, which is possible now because satellites can track leaks on the ground in near real time.

On Dec 2, Bloomberg Philanthropies pledged US$40 million to achieve just this.

Bloomberg announced a partnership with the United Nations Environment Programme, the non-profit Environmental Defence Fund, the IEA and others.

The initiative aims to help developing countries accurately measure and manage methane emissions. It also aims to work with buyers of oil and gas products to build performance standards into supply agreements.

“That creates market incentives for oil and gas companies to better manage leaks. And that will help to hold them accountable for actually doing something about the problem,” said Mr Michael Bloomberg, the UN Secretary-General’s Special Envoy on Climate Ambition and Solutions and founder of Bloomberg Philanthropies.

The initiative will also support advocates who are pushing for stronger government regulation around the world, he said.

And greater scrutiny is needed.

In a statement, environmental intelligence company Kayrros, which tracks methane emissions, said there had been little progress among the signatories of the 2021 Global Methane Pledge towards fulfilling its objective to get greenhouse gas emissions under control.

Kayrros said its data shows that there has been no overall reduction in the methane put out by many of the signatories and that in some nations, such as the US and Iraq, emissions were increasing.

In a letter to the COP28 presidency, more than 300 civil society groups, including Greenpeace, World Wide Fund for Nature and Oil Change International, said voluntary efforts were insufficient and a distraction and called on COP28 to adopt an energy transition package with legal force.

“The only safe and effective way to ‘clean up’ fossil fuel pollution is to phase out fossil fuels,” the letter said.