Harris, S.J., Schwietzke, S., France, J.L. et al. (65 more authors) (2025) Methane emissions from the Nord Stream subsea pipeline leaks. Nature, 637 (8048). pp. 1124-1130. ISSN 0028-0836
Abstract
The amount of methane released to the atmosphere from the Nord Stream subsea pipeline leaks remains uncertain, as reflected in a wide range of estimates. A lack of information regarding the temporal variation in atmospheric emissions has made it challenging to reconcile pipeline volumetric (bottom-up) estimates with measurement-based (top-down) estimates. Here we simulate pipeline rupture emission rates and integrate these with methane dissolution and sea-surface outgassing estimates to model the evolution of atmospheric emissions from the leaks. We verify our modelled atmospheric emissions by comparing them with top-down point-in-time emission-rate estimates and cumulative emission estimates derived from airborne, satellite and tall tower data. We obtain consistency between our modelled atmospheric emissions and top-down estimates and find that 465 ± 20 thousand metric tons of methane were emitted to the atmosphere. Although, to our knowledge, this represents the largest recorded amount of methane released from a single transient event, it is equivalent to 0.1% of anthropogenic methane emissions for 2022. The impact of the leaks on the global atmospheric methane budget brings into focus the numerous other anthropogenic methane sources that require mitigation globally. Our analysis demonstrates that diverse, complementary measurement approaches are needed to quantify methane emissions in support of the Global Methane Pledge.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
---|---|
Authors/Creators: |
|
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © United Nations Environment Programme and the Authors 2025. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. |
Dates: |
|
Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Environment (Leeds) > School of Earth and Environment (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 11 Apr 2025 10:01 |
Last Modified: | 11 Apr 2025 10:01 |
Published Version: | https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08396-8 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Springer |
Identification Number: | 10.1038/s41586-024-08396-8 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:225367 |
Download
Filename: Methane emissions from the Nord Stream.pdf
Licence: CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0