Assessing methane emissions from collapsing Venezuelan oil production using TROPOMI

Nathan, Brian; Maasakkers, Joannes D.; Naus, Stijn; Gautam, Ritesh; Omara, Mark; Varon, Daniel J.; Sulprizio, Melissa P.; Estrada, Lucas A.; Lorente, Alba; Borsdorff, Tobias; Parker, Robert J.; Aben, Ilse

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-24-6845-2024

Articles | Volume 24, issue 11

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-24-6845-2024

© Author(s) 2024. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-24-6845-2024

© Author(s) 2024. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 24, issue 11

Research article

|

13 Jun 2024

Research article |

| 13 Jun 2024

Assessing methane emissions from collapsing Venezuelan oil production using TROPOMI

Brian Nathan, Joannes D. Maasakkers, Stijn Naus, Ritesh Gautam, Mark Omara, Daniel J. Varon, Melissa P. Sulprizio, Lucas A. Estrada, Alba Lorente, Tobias Borsdorff, Robert J. Parker, and Ilse Aben

Data sets

VIIRS nightfire: Satellite pyrometry at night (https://eogdata.mines.edu/products/vnf/#download) Elvidge Christopher D. et al. https://doi.org/10.3390/rs5094423

Evaluation of Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service methane products (https://ads.atmosphere.copernicus.eu/cdsapp#!/home) E. N. Koffi and P. Bergamaschi https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/bitstream/JRC112816/jrc112816_copernicus_ch4_validation_report_v15.pdf

University of Leicester GOSAT Proxy XCH4 v9.0 R. Parker and H. Boesch https://doi.org/10.5285/18ef8247f52a4cb6a14013f8235cc1eb

NCEP Climate Forecast System Version 2 (CFSv2) 6-hourly Products Suranjana Saha et al. https://doi.org/10.5065/D61C1TXF

Model code and software

Integrated Methane Inversion (IMI 1.0): a user-friendly, cloud-based facility for inferring high-resolution methane emissions from TROPOMI satellite observations (https://github.com/geoschem/integrated_methane_inversion) Daniel J. Varon et al. https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-15-5787-2022

Short summary

Venezuela's Lake Maracaibo region is notoriously hard to observe from space and features intensive oil exploitation, although production has strongly decreased in recent years. We estimate methane emissions using 2018–2020 TROPOMI satellite observations with national and regional transport models. Despite the production decrease, we find relatively constant emissions from Lake Maracaibo between 2018 and 2020, indicating that there could be large emissions from abandoned infrastructure.