EO100™ Addendum A: Greenhouse Gas Intensity Quantification Methodology

Download the EO100™ Addendum A: Greenhouse Gas Intensity Quantification Methodology

Addendum A: Greenhouse Gas Intensity Quantification Methodology has been updated to its final version as of January 31, 2023.

With the urgency of climate change action needed, there is increasing interest from investors, natural gas buyers (utilities, distributors, LNG purchasers, hydrogen producers), and governments to be able to quantify the carbon intensity of entire supply chains of natural gas. Understanding and quantifying carbon intensity of upstream feedstock and supply chains are key to driving towards net zero global GHG emissions. Equitable Origin is proposing to include a reporting metric of overall greenhouse gas intensity to enable differentiation of suppliers in the natural gas value chain and promote a positive influence to drive producers towards lower carbon intensity production. This would encourage operators to strive towards ultra-low GHG intensity and get recognition for achieving excellence.

The key objectives of this work are to:

  • Enable quantification of the carbon intensity of the natural gas value chain.
  • Provide an approach that is feasible without being overly complex.
    • Allowing for different methods for emissions quantification
    • Allowing for average parameters to be used rather than location specific if justifiable
    • Accounting for different energy contents of production to normalize intensity
  • Provide a standardized approach whereby all Certified Units are reporting the same metrics.

One key consideration has been on whether Certified Units should or could be compared to each other using this methodology. The recommendation is that full supply chains be compared rather than individual segmentized units. This is important as there will be different supply chain pathways and comparing these pathways is the key to decarbonization. This will enable a buyer to make informed choices on the supply of their gas. This methodology is not meant to be used to compare one specific facility to another. For example, comparing one gas processing plant to another is not the intention of this work or recommended as a best practice as there are so many factors that can affect an individual plant’s intensity such as level of compression required, liquids content, H2S content, and formation CO2 content. Furthermore, comparing a processing plant with compression done within a plant’s boundaries and another processing plant where compression is done in the field prior to arrival at the plant, results in an unfair comparison as the plant without compression will have a much lower GHG intensity. These differences may be levelled out as many Certifiable Units contain multiple gas processing plants but nevertheless, it is not EO’s recommendation to compare segmentized intensities of individual Certified Units to each other.

This methodology is not meant to:

  • Be used to compare facility to facility or even site to site;
  • Replace methane intensity quantification or be used to quantify the methane intensity of a site. It is recognized that the considerations such as allocating emissions between different types of equipment would be different when quantifying methane emissions compared to combustion emissions; or
  • Replace jurisdictional reporting.