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Gas flaring (GF) is an industrial phenomenon requiring a special attention for the serious impacts on environment, climate and human health. To analyses and map GF sites (GFs), the Daytime Approach for GF Investigation (DAFI), which is based on daytime data from the Operational Land Imager (OLI) aboard the Landsat-8 satellite, has recently been developed. The GFs catalogue from the DAFI system, spanning over the years 2013–2021, represents the first worldwide GF product generated from mid-high spatial resolution data (30 m). The DAFI version 2 (v2), also including information from the Multispectral Instrument (MSI) aboard Sentinel-2 satellites, already showed an improved capacity in the mapping of GFs over Iran and Iraq. In this work, the new catalogue arising from the porting of DAFI v2 at global scale is presented and discussed. By using a parallel workflow, based on a loop tiling scheme running in Google Earth Engine, DAFI v2 allowed us to extend the GF inventory globally up to 2023, by analyzing ∼4 million of OLI/OLI-2 (Collection 2) and MSI imagery. Results of this study show: (i) an increased DAFI v2 capacity, of about 41%, in detecting GFs compared to the previous DAFI version; (ii) a downward trend (∼4.6%) in terms of GF sites detected from 2021 to 2023. These findings demonstrated that DAFI v2, which will also include the estimates of radiative power at different spatial scales, may contribute in assessing and monitoring the GFs activities and in evaluating the effectiveness of the greenhouse gas-emission reduction strategies at global, continental, national and local scales.

The use of hydrocarbon fuels increases with population growth and rising standards of living, and so does natural gas flaring. Natural gas flaring is both a waste of natural resources and a violation of Nigeria’s energy policy for sustainable development through natural gas conservation. However, it remains the most cost-efficient and effective associated natural gas (ANG) management option in developing countries such as Nigeria. The World Bank’s initiative to eliminate routine gas flaring by 2030 has increased the need to limit or eliminate routine gas flaring. Often, studies on natural gas utilisation techniques fail to consider the lack of practical tools that integrate economic, technical, and regulatory factors into a gas flaring management framework, and the intricacies of existing tools, which often come at the expense of simplicity to achieve real-time information output. This paper aims to establish a framework and ANG management tool to reduce regular gas flaring in Nigeria. This research established a management framework (using a flowchart decision tree) and models to provide a user-friendly ANG flaring tool (using a MATLAB graphical front end user interface with back-end ASPEN HYSYS thermodynamic models). This was combined with techno-economic models for liquefied natural gas, gas-to-methanol, and gas-to-wire ANG utilisation options. The tool was then tested with data obtained from Fields Y and X in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. The results, considering both economic and technical factors, showed that the choice of liquefied natural gas for Field Y was best due to its proximity to the pipeline infrastructure and its cost-effectiveness, and the availability of a high-demand LNG market for that area. For Field X, gas-to-wire was best due to its proximity to the electrical grid and high electricity requirements for that area. Additional geographical profiles in West Africa and ANG utilisation alternatives were recommended for further investigation. This paper developed and validated a one-of-a-kind ANG flaring management tool that incorporates techno-economic analysis of selected ANG utilisation options to assist operators and investors in making more profitable investment decisions.

There are numerous risks associated with mining and owning cryptocurrencies, and exploring and producing oil and natural gas are highly risky, costly, and controversial. A marriage of digital mining and exploring and producing oil and natural gas has reduced the major risks and costs for both the crypto miner and the petroleum industry. On the one hand, crypto mining requires an enormous amount of electricity, which is not environmentally friendly. On the other hand, when drilling for petroleum resources, natural gas is often discovered, but due to a lack of resources or pipeline availability, a massive amount of natural gas is vented into the atmosphere or burned (called flaring). Today, however, this normally wasted gas (called stranded natural gas) is being used to create cheap electricity for mining server containers stationed near drilling rigs, which are used to create cryptocurrencies. This results in reduced CO2 emissions, lower costs for drillers, and greater royalties going to landowners.

An effective characterization of gas flaring is hampered by the lack of systematic, complete and reliable data on its magnitude and spatial distribution. In the last years, a few satellite methods have been developed to provide independent information on gas flaring activity at global, national and local scale. Among these, a MODIS-based method, aimed at the computation of gas flared volumes by an Italian plant, was proposed. In this work, a more general version of this approach, named RST-FLARE, has been developed to provide reliable information on flaring sites localization and gas emitted volumes over a long time period for the Niger Delta region, one of the top five gas flaring areas in the world. Achieved results showed a good level of accuracy, in terms of flaring sites localization (95% of spatial match) and volume estimates (mean bias between in 16% and 20%, at annual scale and 2–9% in the long period) when compared to independent data, provided both by other satellite techniques and national/international organizations. Outcomes of this work seem to indicate that RST-FLARE can be used to provide, at different geographic scales, quite accurate data on gas flaring, suitable for monitoring purposes for governments and local authorities.

The USA, China and India are the top three producers of municipal solid waste. The composition of solid wastes varies with income: low-to-middle-income population generates mainly organic wastes, whereas high-income population produces more waste paper, metals and glasses. Management of municipal solid waste includes recycling, incineration, waste-to-energy conversion, composting or landfilling. Landfilling for solid waste disposal is preferred in many municipalities globally. Landfill sites act as ecological reactors where wastes undergo physical, chemical and biological transformations. Hence, critical factors for sustainable landfilling are landfill liners, the thickness of the soil cover, leachate collection, landfill gas recovery and flaring facilities. Here, we review the impact of landfill conditions such as construction, geometry, weather, temperature, moisture, pH, biodegradable matter and hydrogeological parameters on the generation of landfill gases and leachate. Bioreactor landfills appear as the next-generation sanitary landfills, because they augment solid waste stabilization in a time-efficient manner, as a result of controlled recirculation of leachate and gases. We discuss volume reduction, resource recovery, valorization of dumped wastes, environmental protection and site reclamation toward urban development. We present the classifications and engineered iterations of landfills, operations, mechanisms and mining.

Methane emissions associated with the production, transport, and use of oil and natural gas increase the climatic impacts of energy use; however, little is known about how emissions vary temporally and with commodity prices. We present airborne and ground-based data, supported by satellite observations, to measure weekly to monthly changes in total methane emissions in the United States' Permian Basin during a period of volatile oil prices associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. As oil prices declined from ∼ USD 60 to USD 20 per barrel, emissions changed concurrently from 3.3 % to 1.9 % of natural gas production; as prices partially recovered, emissions increased back to near initial values. Concurrently, total oil and natural gas production only declined by ∼ 10 % from the peak values seen in the months prior to the crash. Activity data indicate that a rapid decline in well development and subsequent effects on associated gas flaring and midstream infrastructure throughput are the likely drivers of temporary emission reductions. Our results, along with past satellite observations, suggest that under more typical price conditions, the Permian Basin is in a state of overcapacity in which rapidly growing associated gas production exceeds midstream capacity and leads to high methane emissions.

This paper presents a comprehensive assessment of historical (1990–2010) global anthropogenic particulate matter (PM) emissions including the consistent and harmonized calculation of mass-based size distribution (PM1, PM2. 5, PM10), as well as primary carbonaceous aerosols including black carbon (BC) and organic carbon (OC). The estimates were developed with the integrated assessment model GAINS, where source- and region-specific technology characteristics are explicitly included. This assessment includes a number of previously unaccounted or often misallocated emission sources, i.e. kerosene lamps, gas flaring, diesel generators, refuse burning; some of them were reported in the past for selected regions or in the context of a particular pollutant or sector but not included as part of a total estimate. Spatially, emissions were calculated for 172 source regions (as well as international shipping), presented for 25 global regions, and allocated to 0.5°  ×  0.5° longitude–latitude grids. No independent estimates of emissions from forest fires and savannah burning are provided and neither windblown dust nor unpaved roads emissions are included. We estimate that global emissions of PM have not changed significantly between 1990 and 2010, showing a strong decoupling from the global increase in energy consumption and, consequently, CO2 emissions, but there are significantly different regional trends, with a particularly strong increase in East Asia and Africa and a strong decline in Europe, North America, and the Pacific region. This in turn resulted in important changes in the spatial pattern of PM burden, e.g. European, North American, and Pacific contributions to global emissions dropped from nearly 30 % in 1990 to well below 15 % in 2010, while Asia's contribution grew from just over 50 % to nearly two-thirds of the global total in 2010. For all PM species considered, Asian sources represented over 60 % of the global anthropogenic total, and residential combustion was the most important sector, contributing about 60 % for BC and OC, 45 % for PM2. 5, and less than 40 % for PM10, where large combustion sources and industrial processes are equally important. Global anthropogenic emissions of BC were estimated at about 6.6 and 7.2 Tg in 2000 and 2010, respectively, and represent about 15 % of PM2. 5 but for some sources reach nearly 50 %, i.e. for the transport sector. Our global BC numbers are higher than previously published owing primarily to the inclusion of new sources. This PM estimate fills the gap in emission data and emission source characterization required in air quality and climate modelling studies and health impact assessments at a regional and global level, as it includes both carbonaceous and non-carbonaceous constituents of primary particulate matter emissions. The developed emission dataset has been used in several regional and global atmospheric transport and climate model simulations within the ECLIPSE (Evaluating the Climate and Air Quality Impacts of Short-Lived Pollutants) project and beyond, serves better parameterization of the global integrated assessment models with respect to representation of black carbon and organic carbon emissions, and built a basis for recently published global particulate number estimates.

A set of methods are presented for the global survey of natural gas flaring using data collected by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration/National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration NASA/NOAA Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS). The accuracy of the flared gas volume estimates is rated at ±9.5%. VIIRS is particularly well suited for detecting and measuring the radiant emissions from gas flares through the collection of shortwave and near-infrared data at night, recording the peak radiant emissions from flares. In 2012, a total of 7467 individual flare sites were identified. The total flared gas volume is estimated at 143 (±13.6) billion cubic meters (BCM), corresponding to 3.5% of global production. While the USA has the largest number of flares, Russia leads in terms of flared gas volume. Ninety percent of the flared gas volume was found in upstream production areas, 8% at refineries and 2% at liquified natural gas (LNG) terminals. The results confirm that the bulk of natural gas flaring occurs in upstream production areas. VIIRS data can provide site-specific tracking of natural gas flaring for use in evaluating efforts to reduce and eliminate routine flaring.

The Open-source Data Inventory for Anthropogenic CO2 (ODIAC) is a global high-spatial-resolution gridded emissions data product that distributes carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuel combustion. The emissions spatial distributions are estimated at a 1 × 1 km spatial resolution over land using power plant profiles (emissions intensity and geographical location) and satellite-observed nighttime lights. This paper describes the year 2016 version of the ODIAC emissions data product (ODIAC2016) and presents analyses that help guide data users, especially for atmospheric CO2 tracer transport simulations and flux inversion analysis. Since the original publication in 2011, we have made modifications to our emissions modeling framework in order to deliver a comprehensive global gridded emissions data product. Major changes from the 2011 publication are (1) the use of emissions estimates made by the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC) at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) by fuel type (solid, liquid, gas, cement manufacturing, gas flaring, and international aviation and marine bunkers); (2) the use of multiple spatial emissions proxies by fuel type such as (a) nighttime light data specific to gas flaring and (b) ship/aircraft fleet tracks; and (3) the inclusion of emissions temporal variations. Using global fuel consumption data, we extrapolated the CDIAC emissions estimates for the recent years and produced the ODIAC2016 emissions data product that covers 2000–2015. Our emissions data can be viewed as an extended version of CDIAC gridded emissions data product, which should allow data users to impose global fossil fuel emissions in a more comprehensive manner than the original CDIAC product. Our new emissions modeling framework allows us to produce future versions of the ODIAC emissions data product with a timely update. Such capability has become more significant given the CDIAC/ORNL's shutdown. The ODIAC data product could play an important role in supporting carbon cycle science, especially modeling studies with space-based CO2 data collected in near real time by ongoing carbon observing missions such as the Japanese Greenhouse gases Observing SATellite (GOSAT), NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2), and upcoming future missions. The ODIAC emissions data product including the latest version of the ODIAC emissions data (ODIAC2017, 2000–2016) is distributed from http://db.cger.nies.go.jp/dataset/ODIAC/ with a DOI (10.17595/20170411.001).

This paper presents a summary of the work done within the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme project ECLIPSE (Evaluating the Climate and Air Quality Impacts of Short-Lived Pollutants). ECLIPSE had a unique systematic concept for designing a realistic and effective mitigation scenario for short-lived climate pollutants (SLCPs; methane, aerosols and ozone, and their precursor species) and quantifying its climate and air quality impacts, and this paper presents the results in the context of this overarching strategy. The first step in ECLIPSE was to create a new emission inventory based on current legislation (CLE) for the recent past and until 2050. Substantial progress compared to previous work was made by including previously unaccounted types of sources such as flaring of gas associated with oil production, and wick lamps. These emission data were used for present-day reference simulations with four advanced Earth system models (ESMs) and six chemistry transport models (CTMs). The model simulations were compared with a variety of ground-based and satellite observational data sets from Asia, Europe and the Arctic. It was found that the models still underestimate the measured seasonality of aerosols in the Arctic but to a lesser extent than in previous studies. Problems likely related to the emissions were identified for northern Russia and India, in particular. To estimate the climate impacts of SLCPs, ECLIPSE followed two paths of research: the first path calculated radiative forcing (RF) values for a large matrix of SLCP species emissions, for different seasons and regions independently. Based on these RF calculations, the Global Temperature change Potential metric for a time horizon of 20 years (GTP20) was calculated for each SLCP emission type. This climate metric was then used in an integrated assessment model to identify all emission mitigation measures with a beneficial air quality and short-term (20-year) climate impact. These measures together defined a SLCP mitigation (MIT) scenario. Compared to CLE, the MIT scenario would reduce global methane (CH4) and black carbon (BC) emissions by about 50 and 80 %, respectively. For CH4, measures on shale gas production, waste management and coal mines were most important. For non-CH4 SLCPs, elimination of high-emitting vehicles and wick lamps, as well as reducing emissions from gas flaring, coal and biomass stoves, agricultural waste, solvents and diesel engines were most important. These measures lead to large reductions in calculated surface concentrations of ozone and particulate matter. We estimate that in the EU, the loss of statistical life expectancy due to air pollution was 7.5 months in 2010, which will be reduced to 5.2 months by 2030 in the CLE scenario. The MIT scenario would reduce this value by another 0.9 to 4.3 months. Substantially larger reductions due to the mitigation are found for China (1.8 months) and India (11–12 months). The climate metrics cannot fully quantify the climate response. Therefore, a second research path was taken. Transient climate ensemble simulations with the four ESMs were run for the CLE and MIT scenarios, to determine the climate impacts of the mitigation. In these simulations, the CLE scenario resulted in a surface temperature increase of 0.70 ± 0.14 K between the years 2006 and 2050. For the decade 2041–2050, the warming was reduced by 0.22 ± 0.07 K in the MIT scenario, and this result was in almost exact agreement with the response calculated based on the emission metrics (reduced warming of 0.22 ± 0.09 K). The metrics calculations suggest that non-CH4 SLCPs contribute ~ 22 % to this response and CH4 78 %. This could not be fully confirmed by the transient simulations, which attributed about 90 % of the temperature response to CH4 reductions. Attribution of the observed temperature response to non-CH4 SLCP emission reductions and BC specifically is hampered in the transient simulations by small forcing and co-emitted species of the emission basket chosen. Nevertheless, an important conclusion is that our mitigation basket as a whole would lead to clear benefits for both air quality and climate. The climate response from BC reductions in our study is smaller than reported previously, possibly because our study is one of the first to use fully coupled climate models, where unforced variability and sea ice responses cause relatively strong temperature fluctuations that may counteract (and, thus, mask) the impacts of small emission reductions. The temperature responses to the mitigation were generally stronger over the continents than over the oceans, and with a warming reduction of 0.44 K (0.39–0.49) K the largest over the Arctic. Our calculations suggest particularly beneficial climate responses in southern Europe, where surface warming was reduced by about 0.3 K and precipitation rates were increased by about 15 (6–21) mm yr−1 (more than 4 % of total precipitation) from spring to autumn. Thus, the mitigation could help to alleviate expected future drought and water shortages in the Mediterranean area. We also report other important results of the ECLIPSE project.