OGCI welcomes UN, World Bank focus on methane

Bjørn Otto Sverdrup, Chair of the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative’s Executive Committee and head of the Oil & Gas Decarbonization Charter Secretariat said:

“We welcome the UN and World Bank’s focus on reducing methane emissions within the oil and gas sector – it’s a challenge this group of industry leaders is working to address.

Methane reduction is the cornerstone of our work at the Oil & Gas Climate Initiative (OGCI) and the Oil & Gas Decarbonization Charter (OGDC) and we support further collaboration across industry, government and international organizations to accelerate progress. OGCI’s member companies have shown that large scale reductions of methane emissions and flaring can be achieved.

Through OGCI and working with OGDC signatories, we are helping scale proven solutions across the industry through knowledge sharing and leadership. As a truly global initiative that represents ~40% of oil and gas production, two-thirds of which are national oil companies, OGDC is demonstrating that companies can accelerate voluntary methane mitigation through knowledge sharing and leadership.

OGCI members and OGDC signatories remain committed to eliminate routine flaring and achieve near zero methane emissions by 2030 and we will continue sharing what we’ve learned across the wider industry because the fastest way to scale progress is through collaboration. Much of the work lies ahead of us.”

Background:

• OGCI is working with the industry to reduce methane emissions and flaring through its Satellite Monitoring Campaign as well as providing technical support and capacity building to operators, including OGDC signatories, to support methane reduction following emissions detections.
• OGCI’s recent collaboration with non-profit Carbon Mapper leverages public satellite data to support and enable local operators to build strategies to reduce their methane emissions.
• OGCI works across several partnerships and initiatives on methane emissions reduction including with intergovernmental institutions, NGOs and non-profits, think tanks and academic institutions. These include the World Bank’s Global Flaring and Methane Reduction Partnership (GFMR), the Environmental Defense Fund, Carbon Mapper, Imperial College and the Payne Institute.
• OGCI engages regularly with the World Bank’s GFMR on how to best use technologies such as satellite monitoring and detection to support countries and companies to abate their methane emissions.
• OGCI supported the launch of the GFMR and some of its member companies are among its anchor funders.
• Go to OGCI’s Methane Hub to learn more about our work and see how our members reduce their methane emissions here
• Learn more about OGDC here