Climate Special 17: Plugging the Leaks

As we continue our series on China-US climate cooperation, today we discuss how China is concentrating its efforts to reduce methane emissions, a powerful greenhouse gas, and opening up to international cooperation, especially with the US.

Transcript

Plugging the Leaks 

As we continue our series on China-US climate cooperation, today we discuss how China is concentrating its efforts to reduce methane emissions, a powerful greenhouse gas, and opening up to international cooperation, especially with the US.

In the first week of the 29th United Nations Climate Change Conference held in Baku, Azerbaijan in November 2024, otherwise referred to as COP29, China, the US, and Azerbaijan hosted a summit on reducing emissions of methane and other non-carbon greenhouse gases.

Patricia Espinosa, former executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (or UNFCCC), and Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency (IEA), called on all parties to the Paris Agreement (made in 2015) to work out their Nationally Determined Contributions (or NDCs) by 2035. An NDC is a national plan of action on how each country intends to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, which include CO2, nitrous oxide, and methane.

Data from the IEA shows that methane is the second-biggest greenhouse gas after CO2. In 2023, global methane emissions totaled 580 million tons, around 60 percent due to human activity, with agriculture, fossil fuels and decomposition of landfill waste being the top contributors, and natural sources such as wetlands, volcanic eruptions, permafrost and wildfires accounting for around 40 percent.

According to the IEA, there are two key characteristics determining the impact of greenhouse gases on the climate: the length of time they remain in the atmosphere and their ability to absorb energy. Although methane, a key component of natural gas, has a much shorter atmospheric lifetime than CO2, around 12 years compared with centuries, it absorbs much more energy in the atmosphere. Methane’s Global Warming Potential (or GWP), an index estimating how a greenhouse gas influences climate warming, is more than 80 times more potent than CO2 over a 20-year timeframe, expressed as GWP20, and about 30 times more potent than CO2 over a 100-year timeframe, expressed as GWP100.

According to the 2023 report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, global methane emissions must be reduced by an average of 34 percent by 2030 relative to 2019 to ensure the rise in global temperature does not exceed 1.5℃, according to the terms of the Paris Agreement, which was signed by 175 countries and ratified on November 4, 2016. By 2024, the number of signatories was 195.

This is why countries are putting more emphasis on the reduction of methane emissions. In The Sunnylands Statement on Enhancing Cooperation to Address the Climate Crisis inked between China and the US in November 2023, both sides pledged to make more efforts and cooperation to reduce methane emissions.

Global Methane Tracker

On March 13, 2024, the IEA released the Global Methane Tracker 2024, revealing that in 2023, the world emitted nearly 120 million tons of methane from the production and use of fossil fuels and another 10 million tons from bioenergy, largely stemming from the traditional use of biomass, which refers to direct combustion of locally available fuels like wood, dung and agricultural byproducts for cooking and heating.

Methane emissions reached a record high in 2019 and have remained around this level ever since. Compared to 2022, large methane emissions detected by satellites have grown by 50 percent in 2023. Major fossil fuel leaks, including from blowouts in oil and gas wells, caused five million tons of methane emissions.

The IEA report cited the most recent comprehensive assessment provided in the Global Methane Budget as suggesting that annual global methane emissions were around 580 million tons in 2023.

Those figures tally with the 2023 WMO Greenhouse Gas Bulletin published by the World Meteorological Organization in October 2024, which revealed that in 2023, the world’s average concentration of methane in the atmosphere was 1,934 parts per billion – 2.65 times more than pre-industrial levels.

The energy profile of a country affects where its methane comes from. The US, relying on oil and gas energy, is the biggest emitter of methane due to oil and gas extraction, while China, the world’s biggest coal miner, emitted the most coal mine methane. In some European countries, agriculture is the leading source of methane emissions. Agricultural methane emissions are caused by enteric fermentation (that is, digestion in cattle), as well as manure, rice growing and burning crop residues.

Given methane’s potential to increase global warming, many countries are trying to mitigate emissions. According to the IEA, more than 50 oil and gas companies, which produce about 40 percent of the world’s total oil and gas, joined the Oil and Gas Decarbonization Charter, which was launched at COP28 in Dubai in 2023 to speed up emissions reduction within the industry.

The US, Canada and a number of EU countries have formulated action plans or schemes on reducing methane emissions. In 2023, China released its own plan.

The Global Methane Pledge, initiated by the US and the European Union at COP26 in Glasgow in 2021 after the Biden administration returned to the Paris Agreement, is an attempt to keep the global rise in temperatures to 1.5℃. By January 2025, there were 159 national participants, plus the European Commission. Parties to the pledge, representing 55 percent of global emissions from the energy sector, agreed to reduce methane emissions by at least 30 percent by 2030 based on 2020 levels, which has the potential to reduce warming by at least 0.2°C by 2050.

The UN’s 2021 Global Methane Report warned that it would be necessary to cut methane emissions to prevent warming of 0.3℃ by the 2040s, preventing 255,000 premature deaths and reducing hospitalizations due to diseases such as asthma.

According to the IEA estimates, if countries and enterprises implement methane reduction plans in full and on time, fossil fuel methane emissions could be cut by around 50 percent from 2023 levels by 2030. But it warned that in many cases, these plans are not supported by specific policies or measures. Existing policies and plans can only reduce emissions from fossil fuel operations by around 20 percent by 2030.

The IEA has appealed to countries to set “bolder targets on energy-related methane and lay out plans to achieve them,” according to the Global Methane Tracker website.

China’s Efforts

At the end of 2024, the Chinese government submitted its first Biennial Transparency Report on Climate Change to the UN, detailing the country’s emissions for 2020 and 2021. It revealed that in 2021, China’s methane emissions were 60.65 million tons, accounting for 13.1 percent of the country’s total greenhouse gas emissions, 0.4 percent more than in 2020.

While China has not yet joined the Global Methane Pledge, its government has devoted a lot of resources to cutting methane emissions.

At COP28 in Dubai, China for the first time pledged to include all greenhouse gas emissions, including methane, into its NDC plan by 2035. Ahead of the COP 28, in November 2023 China issued its first national methane emission control action plan. The plan commits to several targets to cut methane emissions across several sectors.

Xie Zhenhua, former Chinese Special Envoy for Climate Change, told media at COP28 that it was an international misunderstanding about China that “no action plan equaled no measures.” China had taken an array of measures to reduce methane emissions caused by coal, oil, gas, agriculture and urban garbage long before, Xie said.

An official from China’s Ministry of Environment and Ecology (MEE) told media at the same COP that China had included cutting methane emissions into its 2007 program in response to climate change. Measures were written into all subsequent Five-Year plans, which serve as guiding documents for the country’s development.

In October 2021, China submitted its new targets and measures on implementing its NDC, for the first time defining the direction of controlling methane emissions in the energy sector. The same year, leading Chinese oil and gas companies backed by the central government established the China Oil and Gas Methane Emissions Reduction Alliance to explore reducing methane emissions across all industries. It committed to reducing the average methane emission intensity

in natural gas production of member companies to below 0.25 percent by 2025, approaching world-leading levels, and reaching world-class levels by 2035. Since 2020, the Chinese government has subsidized enterprises to recycle and use methane derived from coal seam gas, also known as coal bed methane, one of the primary sources of methane. This includes capturing methane emissions and generating power. 

Between 2021 and 2022, Chinese authorities published several documents on reducing emissions in agriculture and rural areas, proposing a number of technologies to reduce methane emissions from rice fields (anaerobic fermentation produces methane), cattle digestion and manure, and optimizing the use of biogas emitted from rotting vegetation, which includes methane that can also be used to generate electricity.

Experts said the 2023 action plan is a national guideline for methane emissions control. The document proposes to build a national mechanism for monitoring, reporting and verifying methane emissions – the MRV mechanism. 

“Such a mechanism is good for ensuring data accuracy and transparency, and will especially be good for combining bottom-up monitoring with top-down monitoring,” an expert from the Beijing office of an international environmental protection organization who asked for anonymity told NewsChina. “China may gradually establish an integrated space-air-ground monitoring system using drones and satellites,” he added.

The national MRV mechanism will aid authorities to precisely know about methane emissions and their evolution, said Wang Jinnan, deputy director of the Population Resource and Environment Commission of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. Based on this data, authorities and businesses can target measures more precisely to support the country’s carbon objectives, Wang said at the 2024 Methane Forum in Beijing.

Another highlight of the 2023 action plan is it quantifies the utilization rate of some methane emissions. The action plan calls for the Chinese energy sector to increase the annual use of coal seam gas to 6 billion cubic meters by 2025 and by 2030, the collection rate of oil field-associated gas will reach advanced international levels. It proposes to raise the comprehensive utilization rate of livestock and poultry manure to above 80 percent by 2025 and above 85 percent by 2030, and to increase that of municipal solid waste to around 60 percent. By 2025, the hazard-free disposal rate of urban sludge (the end product of wastewater treatment processes) is expected to reach over 90 percent.

According to a research paper published on February 13, 2025 in the National Science Review under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, methane accounted for 72 percent of China’s annual agricultural non-CO2 greenhouse gas emissions from 1980 to 2023. Methane and nitrous oxide emissions from agriculture have stabilized since around 2015, due to improvements in agricultural efficiency and a transition to green agricultural practices, along with the decline in population growth. The paper, titled Recent Stabilization of Agricultural Non-CO2 Greenhouse Gas Emissions in China, is co-authored by a team from Peking University, Zhejiang University, Sun Yat-sen University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. 

At the end of 2024, the MEE issued the revised emissions standards for coal seam gas, stipulating that mine gas with a methane content of 8 percent or higher, and amounting to more than 10 cubic meters of pure methane per minute, must be captured, or should be destroyed in situ, for example through chemical processes. According to the latest Chinese government report on China’s response to climate change submitted to the UN at the end of 2024, the revised emissions standard for coal seam gas alone will help reduce annual methane emissions by about 57 million tons of CO2 equivalent by 2030.

Liu Zhenmin, China’s Special Envoy for Climate Change, said at COP29 in Baku that China has continued to build and detail measures and policies for methane emissions to strengthen and improve the framework. Meanwhile, the government is promoting international cooperation and improving the market mechanism on emissions control, with enterprises putting more money into emissions cuts.

Sino-US Cooperation

As another leading emitter of methane, the US ramped up action during the Biden administration. In July 2023, the US hosted the country’s first methane summit with experts from the government, academia and the tech and private sectors, leading discussions on how to monitor and control domestic methane emissions and international cooperation.

The US published its first national strategy for overall methane emissions cuts in 2021. In 2022, the American government revised the action plan, and in 2023, the White House published a document on how the US has implemented it. The same year, the American government also established the Methane Finance Sprint to support emissions cuts and promote international cooperation.

Although China and the US differ in energy structure, many of their measures are similar, which indicates there could be room for the two countries to cooperate in methane control, despite the unstable bilateral relationship. The Sunnylands Statement was widely regarded as a positive outcome for bilateral exchanges on addressing climate change, especially after the US rejoined the Paris Agreement in early 2021.

In the statement, the two countries announced setting up a working group to promote action on climate change, aiming to increase talks and cooperation. In early September 2024, the working group conducted its second meeting in Beijing following the first in May in Washington, DC, where Chinese Climate Envoy Liu Zhenmin and his American counterpart John Podesta talked about solving climate risks and implementing their respective NDCs.

The anonymous expert said that in the next years, China and the US will promote bilateral cooperation and improve methods to control methane emissions in their respective MRV mechanisms, and they will both pay attention to the Methane Alert and Response System of the UN’s International Methane Emission Observatory (IMEO), which is planned to include furnace coal and landfill sites in 2025.

“In recent years, methane control exchanges and cooperation between China and the US have been constantly deepening, which indicates their international responsibility as major countries and has significance for the world’s response to climate change,” the expert said, adding that China and the US’s responsibility is common and differentiated, and that practical and feasible cooperation plans and projects based on the two countries’ national situations is helpful to promote the global response to climate change.

Li Zheng, director of the Climate Change and Sustainable Development Institute, Tsinghua University, talked about Sino-US cooperation in climate change at a COP29 meeting on China’s methane control efforts, where he said that cooperation between Chinese and American regions and between both countries’ schools and organizations is ongoing.

As Li noted, in May 2024, a Sino-US senior regional meeting on climate change was held in Berkeley, California, during which California signed a cooperation memorandum with Beijing, Shanghai, and the provinces of Jiangsu, Guangdong and Hainan, as well as the National Development and Reform Commission and the MEE. The signatories agreed to launch cooperation projects in a couple of pilot areas.

In Li’s eyes, international cooperation could come in multiple, feasible ways. He stressed the need to further promote subnational cooperation, such as between regions, organizations and schools, and push forward global cooperation within international platforms like the  IMEO and Mission Innovation, an international initiative on clean energy joined by 22 countries and organizations. For example, Li said that Tsinghua University and Harvard University held forums on possible cooperation between the two countries in several areas, including designing of methane emission lists.

However, President Donald Trump, on his first day in office on January 20, 2025, announced that yet again he is pulling the US out of the Paris Agreement, which media reported is likely to happen within a year. In response, Florencia Soto Nino, Associate Spokesperson for the UN Secretary-General, said in a statement published on January 20 that UN Secretary-General António Guterres is confident that US cities, states and businesses will (quote) “continue to demonstrate vision and leadership by working for the low-carbon, resilient economic growth that will create quality jobs.”

Well, that’s the end of our podcast. Our theme music is by the famous film score composer Roc Chen. We want to thank our writer Xie Ying, translator Du Guodong, and copy editor Pu Ren. And thank you for listening! We hope you enjoyed it, and if you did, please tell a friend so they too can understand The Context.