Executive Summary
Accurate measurement of greenhouse gas emissions is of critical importance to meeting the internationally agreed climate goals contained in the Paris Agreement. Australia has committed to improving measurement, reporting, and verification of greenhouse gases in a number of international agreements. These include the Global Methane Pledge and the very recently announced International Working Group to develop a Measurement, Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification framework for the gas industry.
Australia has the potential to have world-leading monitoring capability, but lacks core scientific infrastructure required to deliver on its global commitments in the most effective way. This roadmap seeks to remedy this. Relatively minor investments in developing capacity in critical areas will greatly improve Australia’s ability to deliver upon those commitments, and allow the nation to once again lead global progress toward credible, transparent and verifiable greenhouse gas emissions reporting.
Technologies to measure greenhouse gas emissions are undergoing a step change, with more growth on the way. Initiatives such as the Oil and Gas Methane Partnership, the Steel Methane Partnership and a number of other industry and international agreements have accelerated development of these important tools. The total estimated cost of this new network capability would be $40 million initially for the establishment of the network and related workforce capacity expansion, and $6 million per year for maintenance and ongoing operational staffing. It is vital that Australia ride this wave, rather than allowing itself to be caught by it.
The National Emissions Monitoring Roadmap lays out a plan for the establishment and strengthening of the National Emissions Monitoring Network, an integrated greenhouse gas monitoring network over Australia utilising a mix of ground-based, in situ, and remote sensing, along with satellite measurements in combination with inverse modelling.
This network should have the following features:
- A minimum of 12 new monitoring sites established around Australia, with each measuring methane, carbon dioxide, and nitrous oxide, and ancillary gases.
- In addition, at least four of the new sites should incorporate vertical column measurements (validated with aircraft- based in situ measurements) to measure the primary greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide) to ensure comparability of in situ and satellite data sets and to enable accurate inverse modelling
- The establishment of a central calibration laboratory to propagate calibration, perform quality control over the network and to anchor its data to global standards
- The suite of gases monitored should be reviewed every two years, taking into account need, available technologies, and global monitoring trends, with provision for equipment upgrades to align with global best practice over time.
It is essential that Australia’s national science agency, CSIRO, play a key role in coordinating the monitoring network and managing the data collected, with maintenance of the network and some elements of the data collection being managed by relevant local partners, including CSIRO, state and territory governments, and the university sector. Data collected through the network should be made freely available both nationally and internationally, and should follow best practices to ensure global comparability.
The proposed monitoring network meets several policy needs:
- It will increase our ability to verify facility-level monitoring under the National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting Act 2007 (NGER Act) using regional atmospheric measurements to verify aggregate regional bottom-up reporting. Delivering this roadmap complements the work the Climate Change Authority is currently undertaking on measurement, reporting and verification under that Act.
- Emissions could more precisely be attributed to their source sector via measurements of co-emitted tracers. Accompanying targeted mobile and satellite measurements are necessary to evaluate emissions with the granularity required to verify facility-level reporting and identify specific mitigation opportunities. This is immediately relevant for ensuring that the Safeguard Mechanism delivers on its important goals.
- Australia will better be able to track progress toward its legislated commitments under the Paris Agreement. Improving the topdown picture of Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions would play a vital role in verifying Australia’s reported emissions and greenhouse gas inventory.
- Precise knowledge of Australia’s emissions would allow cost-effective mitigation providing a strong return on investment in the network.
- Carbon dioxide uptake from offsets would be able to be estimated more reliably, with implications for evaluating the climate benefits and commercial viability of sequestration projects.
It also improves Australia’s ability to contribute to global climate and greenhouse gas monitoring. Our existing network currently lags behind comparable greenhouse gas monitoring networks in Europe and the UK.
Improvements are needed to the NGER Act to incorporate empirical measurement data at both source and site level. These measurements should be required of operators, with independent verification run by scientists. The proposed NEMN will allow verification of regional emission totals from key emission areas. For facility specific reporting and verification, more targeted measurement approaches such as airborne and ground-based mobile surveys are required to provide the empirical evidence needed to evaluate compliance with regulations and identify mitigation opportunities.
This proposal builds on Australia’s existing strengths in greenhouse gas monitoring, including a dedicated Atmospheric Composition and Chemistry Group within CSIRO Environment, expertise within the Bureau of Meteorology, and world-leading research groups within the University of New South Wales, the University of Wollongong, The University of Melbourne, and Swinburne University. By expanding the existing network of four monitoring sites to a total of at least 16, Australia will have the data needed to robustly measure greenhouse gas concentrations across the continent.
The network will be supported with a stateof-the-art modelling system to transform the concentration measurements into emissions. Australia has been a world leader in this form of modelling for three decades, pioneering the use of satellite data and the continuous in situ measurements made by the network (Rayner & O’Brien, 2001; Law et al., 2002). The same modelling approaches will also guide the optimal placement of stations in the network to maximise information on emission (Ziehn et al., 2016).
