﻿You're looking at the biggest climate
catastrophe that nobody's talking about.
"All of this. All of this here is methane."
Methane.
A powerful gas silently baking the planet.
It's responsible for more than a quarter of
global warming since the Industrial Revolution.
And it's pouring out of fossil fuel facilities
for no good reason.
"We're talking about plumbing, literally."
That's right!
Cutting methane emissions is one of the cheapest,
fastest
and easiest ways to slow climate change.
But the companies responsible aren't doing it —
and, with a few exceptions,
nobody's even holding them accountable.
"What we're going to be doing today is finding methane —
and working out how to get rid of it."
Let's go methane hunting.
But first let's meet James Turitto from the Clean Air Task Force,
an environmental group pushing for tech and policy solutions
to keep the planet from heating.
It lobbies governments to capture carbon,
cut pollution
and build nuclear power plants.
We're meeting Turitto in Berlin and taking the train down to northern Italy
to search for methane where it shouldn't be.
Turitto's job is to cross the continent tracking down
fugitive methane emissions escaping fossil fuel facilities.
It's detective work that could prove vital
to keeping global warming under control.
"Methane is a gas that absolutely wrecks the climate.
Unlike CO2, it doesn't last long in the
atmosphere before breaking down.
But it's way stronger in the short-term."
It's so strong, in fact, that over a 20-year period
methane heats the planet more
than 80 times more than CO2.
"If we can reduce methane emissions about 45%
in the next ten years, we can actually shave off
almost 0.3 degrees Celsius of warming
during the next 2-3 decades."
[Reporter] "0.3 degrees. Is that a lot, is that little?"
"That's quite a lot, certainly.
It slows down the speed of warming
and gives us more time to solve
the harder challenges with carbon pollution."
The problem is:
Methane concentrations are rising —
fast.
Across the world enormous quantities are pouring out of farms,
landfills
and fossil fuel infrastructure.
The source you might already be familiar with is cattle.
Cows have four stomachs that digest food
in a way that fills their burps with methane.
Quick sidenote:
It's a myth that cow farts are the problem here.
Only a small amount actually comes out the back.
Rice paddies are another big source of the methane emissions from agriculture.
Together with sheep and some other foods,
sources like this make up 40%
of human-caused methane emissions.
Then there's landfills,
responsible for about 20% of the problem.
When bacteria break down organic waste
without oxygen they also produce methane.
But the source we're interested in
is the easiest to fix:
fossil fuels.
They're responsible for one-third of humanity's methane emissions.
The gas we burn for cooking and heating is almost
entirely made up from methane.
But it's leaking everywhere:
offshore rigs,
oil wells,
gas pipelines —
and also the facilities we're about to visit.
We're driving to an industrial park on the outskirts of Milan where fossil gas is stored.
Facilities like this are a vital part of the energy supply chain
that nobody really pays attention to.
"We've come here to see pollution that
you can't see with the naked eye.
You could be living right next to a methane leak
and have absolutely no idea it's happening."
Fossil fuel companies generally aren't too
thrilled about people calling them out for polluting.
So when Turitto turns up at a site like this,
he stays outside the security fence and scans the area
with a special camera to search for methane.
And here's the big question:
Will we spot fugitive methane emissions escaping from the facility?
"So what you're seeing is gas coming out of the vent stack."
This is at the core of what methane hunters do:
making the invisible visible.
[Reporter] "So I literally can't see anything on my phone,
and here we can see a gigantic leak of a gas
pouring out of the top of that pipe."
"Yeah, exactly."
There's a reason my camera can't pick up these emissions.
My phone cost a few hundred euros.
Whereas Turitto's camera cost...
"100,000 euros"
"100,000!?"
The price tag is so high because the camera
picks up infrared radiation at the wavelength
needed to see hydrocarbons like methane.
And although it can't measure how much is leaking out,
the camera does show where the problems are.
"It can see invisible gases, it can detect things
that I as a normal person am not able to detect.
That is mind-blowing.
But it does kind of explain why this whole industry
is getting away with all these methane emissions, right?
People don't have any idea just how much is
leaking out and where it's coming from."
The International Energy Agency estimates the
world's methane emissions from the power sector
are about 70% higher than countries
are reporting in their official data.
But tracking those emissions is tricky —
even for the people hunting methane.
"We're not lost are we?"
"No, we're not lost. [Laughs.]
We went to the site out of the town."
We've driven to another gas storage facility
a little further away from the city.
And less than five minutes after setting up the camera
we can see — you guessed it — another plume of methane.
[Reporter] "You're saying that tall tower over there is actually
pumping out more methane than the last one we just saw?"
"That's definitely more than the last site
we were just at and we're further away too.
It's a little bit harder to see."
The size of these leaks matters because it turns out
governments aren't the only ones
underestimating methane emissions.
The companies responsible often are too.
[Reporter] "So you can reliably go to a place like this,
set the camera up and you're probably going to
see some methane coming out somewhere?"
"Yeah, especially a site like this,
the larger sites, the more equipment you have,
the more likely there's going to be some sort of methane emissions."
There are basically three ways methane gets released.
There are simple leaks,
which could be because a screw hasn't been tightened
or a piece of equipment is rusty.
Then there's venting, where methane is intentionally let out.
This might be done to reduce pressure in a pipe
during maintenance work, for instance.
The third is flaring, where methane coming out of the vent is burned.
Burning methane turns it from a super-harmful gas to,
well, just a regular-harmful one.
But often it's done so poorly that raw methane
is still escaping into the atmosphere.
In 2021 the Clean Air Task Force visited 250 oil and gas sites across Europe.
It documented methane emissions from a variety of sources –
at 180 of them.
These aren't just isolated incidents.
Many pieces of equipment were leaking methane when
Turitto visited 8 months previously.
Some seem to have stopped.
Others are even pumping out more gas than last time.
"Some of the sources can certainly be fixed pretty easily.
We were just looking at a valve that looked like
it really could just be tightened.
Other stuff, fixing and repairing them might be a little
more complex to understand where the emissions are coming from."
We asked the facility operator Snam about the leaks we saw
but they didn't respond to a request for comment.
But site operators aren't the only ones responsible:
Methane is leaking across the entire supply chain.
Before it gets to European storage tanks, it needs to be
extracted from the ground and shipped
or piped vast distances.
That's why we're heading down to La Spezia —
to visit a port where shipments of liquefied natural gas,
or LNG, are being unloaded at a dock.
It's in one of the most beautiful places on the planet.
Well, most of the time.
"The problem is, it's raining, and that means the camera's
probably not going to be able to see much methane."
And to make matters worse, the park we'd wanted
to film the port from has been blocked off by a landslide.
Methane leaking from ships is hard to spot.
But we should be able to catch it at
LNG terminals like this one.
"So we've had to change plan slightly
and so we're going to drive around a bit,
go to another side of the port to see if we can
see anything, hope the rain clears up but...
yeah, I dunno. Not ideal."
The EU is the world's biggest gas importer.
Countries like Italy and Germany rely on gas
for more than one-quarter of their energy demand.
And that leaves them reliant on the biggest exporter:
Russia.
At terminals like this one Europe also receive shipments from the US and Middle East.
But even from our second spot, we can't work out
whether that terminal is leaking methane right now.
"From this distance and these conditions —
the rain, fog, wind and the background — it's
almost impossible to see it from this distance.
You need to be much closer to the source."
And here's the problem:
without constant access to the sites themselves,
there are kind of serious limits on how well
these emissions can be detected.
Luckily there's another way to look at the same problem —
from space.
That's right:
The infrared sensors in satellites hundreds of kilometers
above our heads are helping scientists spot methane
leaking out from under our noses.
And they're terrified by what they're finding.
"In the field we can see all these
leaky defective little materials,
or a tank leaking more than it should.
But you don't see the key players."
This is Thomas Lavaux, a scientist who uses
satellites to identify so-called ultra-emitters of methane.
Satellites aren't perfect:
They struggle to see methane at night,
through clouds or above water.
But on land they're picking up emissions
that are on a whole other level.
Lavaux's study found about 10% of the industry's
methane emissions come from gigantic releases.
They happen rarely
but they're happening all over the world.
Ultra-emitting events come from equipment failing
or companies clearing methane out of pipes
to do maintenance work on them.
"That giant burst of methane is worth a thousand leaks."
And this comes at a heavy price:
lost revenue from wasting gas,
lost lives from air pollution
and lost time in the fight against climate change.
The study found that four countries —
Turkmenistan, Russia, the US and Iran —
could save billions of dollars by fixing just these ultra-emitting events.
And here's the big lesson I've learned so far:
fixing the industry's methane problem is ludicrously cheap.
Fossil fuel companies could cut methane emissions by
a staggering 75% using technologies that already exist.
"In some cases, it's as easy as tightening a bolt or closing a valve."
Some leaks are still bound to happen when equipment wears down
or workers make mistakes.
What companies can choose to do is find and plug them quickly.
"How do you deal with the methane coming out
of vents and flares that haven't been lit?"
"There need to be more regulations and closer inspections of
what facilities are intentionally venting.
It's pretty simple solutions in many cases."
More than 40% of the IEA's suggested emissions
cuts literally wouldn't cost anything.
And that's because companies could take the gas
they waste and actually sell it on.
"When you're venting gas, you're losing a lot of gas.
That's a lot of money."
There are a few reasons for this.
Some companies don't know how much is leaking.
Some would rather invest the capital in
activities that bring shorter-term profits.
And some don't have the infrastructure
to sell it on for industrial use.
But to be completely honest there's
an even bigger scandal here.
"The most surprising thing about all of this is that
some of these methane emissions are not even illegal.
That's the bit that I don't get.
This is warming the planet and there are
not even the regulations in place
to stop companies from doing this."
Things are changing.
"Methane."
"Methane"
"Slash methane"
"A landmark agreement to reduce methane emissions"
At the COP26 climate summit leaders from more than
100 countries pledged to slash global methane emissions
by 30% by the end of the decade.
The European Union plans to introduce new requirements
for measuring and reporting methane emissions,
as well as spotting and plugging leaks.
It's even proposed a ban on venting and flaring.
What it hasn't yet considered, though, is setting a standard
for the oil and gas it buys elsewhere.
Enforcing import standards that cover the whole supply chain
could drive changes in countries with leakier facilities.
That could spur the changes needed to cut
methane emissions globally —
and buy the extra time needed
to stop temperatures rising.
"If you want to see more videos with solutions
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looking at different ways to get us out of this mess."