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In recent years, there has been a concerted effort on the part of The Environmental Defense Fund, the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative, major international oil companies, international organizations such as the United Nations Environmental Program, and institutional investors to reduce methane leakage and flaring. Nevertheless, this remains a difficult goal to achieve because of a lack of data and proper financial incentives. Many oil wells do not have equipment to record how they are handling excess underground methane, and many companies do not report on the level of the methane that is released. As a result, even though methane is a valuable commodity (natural gas), it is not possible to estimate the value that could be captured from the leaked or flared methane and therefore determine the returns from investing in infrastructure to capture them.
Fortunately, there has been progress on this front recently: EDF 2021 has urged investors to engage energy companies to improve flaring transparency, requiring collaboration to establish clear metrics. Several new data sources ranging from satellite imagery to instrumentation at oil wells will be coming online to improve the data. Independent tracking tools are being introduced ( for waste emissions. Converting this data into useful fuel value chain metrics require integration with production data. Flaring Monitor, an open source project, has made some progress on this, and will provide key part of our solution to bridge reporting silos for waste emissions. (this effort could align with the World Bank's Imported Flared Gas Index).
In this project, we will work on using the blockchain to provide trusted data on methane and transfer that data to fuel consumers to incentivize methane reduction at the point of production. The first part of the project will integrate data from different sources to arrive at the best estimate of the methane emissions of a facility. The second part of the project will use Value chain (scope 3) reporting standards to calculate the impact of methane emissions reduction on the fuel used by customers.
help identify these type of indirect impacts. According to the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) value chain reporting has not been very successful in reducing emissions (Patchell 2018).
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LCA applied to fuel carbon intensity standards have no been very effective in mitigating emissions (Plevin et al 2017).
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Waste emission tracking tools
Solution
We propose to use a blockchain oracle, such as Chainlink, to integrate the different sources of data from methane emissions. Several independent sources, such as EDF 2021 urges investors to engage energy companies to improve flaring transparency, requiring collaboration to establish clear metrics, and several new data sources ranging from satellite imagery to instrumentation at oil wells will be coming online to improve the data. Several independent tracking tools are being introduced (GGFR, Flaring Monitor, MethaneSat, UNEP IMEO, flare-intel) for waste emissions.
Converting this data into useful fuel value chain metrics require integration with production data. Flaring Monitor has made some progress on this, and will provide key part of our solution to bridge reporting silos for waste emissions. (this effort could align with the World Bank's Imported Flared Gas Index).
Solution
, could be combined with company reported figures to arrive at an answer. A blockchain oracle is designed for this purpose: It assigns tokens for each source of data and weighs the data according to the tokens held by its source. It could then also increase or decrease the tokens for each data source as the data is subsequently validated or refuted.
Once the combined data is used to derive the methane emissions of an oil producing facility, a We propose a non-fungible token (NFT) contract to could track waste emissions.The the additional emissions from the fuel produced. This carbon tracker NFT (C-NFT) has has been implemented using the ERC-721 standard, as as part of the Hyperledger Labs Net Emission Token (NET) network to issue, transfer, and retire carbon tokens by different accounts. For example:
- Voluntary Carbon Tracker Token (VCT) could be used by industry dealers members to note the amount of methane emissions associated with the oil or natural gas produced at the well.
- Audited Emission Certificate (AEC) could then be assigned to industry/consumers by auditorsEmission Offset Credit (EOC) and Renewable Energy Credit (REC) dealersenergy consumers based on the VCT. Fuel from high methane wells would have higher embedded emission for whoever consumes it.
- Credits similar could be issued to transfer the lower embedded methane emissions from one party to another, helping them meet their emissions reduction goals while providing incentives to reduce methane emissions at the well.
A C-NFT provides a digital emission profile for accounts owned by facilities, e.g., oil and gas field, power plant, refinery (Figure 2).
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