DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17316502
title: Measurement-Based Spatially Explicit Methane Emission Inventory (EI-ME)

description: Accurate and comprehensive assessment of methane emissions, a powerful climate warming pollutant, is a key first step in reducing these emissions, while supporting the ability to track progress toward such reductions over time. While national bottom-up source-level inventories are useful for understanding the sources of methane emissions, they are often unrepresentative across spatial scales, adn their reliance on generic emission factors produces underestimations when compared with measurement-based inventories.

In this work, we compile and analyze previous peer-reviewed measurement-based data on facility-level methane emissions in the US oil and gas sector and use these data to develop statistically robust emissions models from which we estimate total methane emissions for the population of major US oil and gas facilities.

This dataset (EI_ME_v1.0.gpkg) aggregates the results of this measurement-based methane emission inventory (EI-ME), which is focused on oil and gas methane emissions in the US onshore production regions. The emissions estimates are spatially resolved at 0.1 x 0.1 degree spatial scales.

The data layers in the GeoPackage are:



EI-ME_gridded_ch4_emissions: estimated methane emissions, spatially resolved at 0.1x0.1 degree spatial grids

EI-ME_US_oil_gas_basins: major US oil and gas basin boundaries, based on EIA basin boundary definitions.

EI-ME_facility_ch4_measurements_data: A compilation of previous peer-reviewed facility-level measurement-based data for oil and gas methane emissions in the US.


We also provide a netcdf version ("EI_ME_2021_inventory_CONUS_point1_degrees_v1.nc") which includes estimated mean oil and gas methane emissions over the contiguous US (excludes Alaska) aggregated over a slightly offset spatial grid compared to the full domain in the above .gpkg.

Complete details of the emissions model development and dataset creation can be found in the following manuscript:



How to cite: Omara, M., Himmelberger, A., MacKay, K., Williams, J. P., Benmergui, J., Sargent, M., Wofsy, S. C., and Gautam, R.: Constructing a measurement-based spatially explicit inventory of US oil and gas methane emissions (2021), Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 16, 3973–3991, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-16-3973-2024, 2024.


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UPDATE (10/10/2025):

The spatially explicit measurement-based oil and gas methane emissions inventory (EI-ME) is developed by MethaneSAT, a wholly owned subsidiary of Environmental Defense Fund, to support comprehensive oil and gas methane assessment, methane source attribution, and mitigation. The inventory combines ground-based measurement-based data with statistically robust methane emissions modeling to provide representative estimates of total methane emissions for key facility categories in the contiguous US oil and gas supply chain, including well sites, natural-gas compressor stations, processing plants, crude-oil refineries, and pipelines. It is spatially resolved at 0.1x.0.1 degree spatial scales.

 Version 1 of the EI-ME inventory for the contiguous United States was published in 2024 and provided an estimate of the 2021 oil and gas methane emissions and uncertainties that are spatially resolved at 0.1x0.1 degree spatial scales.

 Here, we provide an update to the EI-ME inventory for the years 2023 and 2024. In this update, we follow the same methodology and use the same input emissions datasets as described in detail in Omara et al. (2024), https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-16-3973-2024. We incorporate the latest available oil and gas activity data for the years 2023 and 2024 based on data from Enverus Prism (www.eneverus.com), supplemented with additional information from the Oil and Gas Infrastructure Mapping database (OGIM v2.7, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15103476) and global annual gas flaring data from VIIRS (Visible Infraed Imagin Radiometer Suite), available from the Earth Observation Group (https://eogdata.mines.edu/products/vnf/global_gas_flare.html).

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Contact at Environmental Defense Fund: Mark Omara (momara@edf.org), Anthony Himmelberger (ahimmelberger@methanesat.org)

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