EGU25-4728, updated on 14 Mar 2025
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-4728
EGU General Assembly 2025
© Author(s) 2025. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Oral | Thursday, 01 May, 14:00–14:10 (CEST)
 
Room F2
Airborne Measurements and Modelling of Methane Emissions from Oil and Gas Industry During the ROMEO Campaign 2019
Hossein Maazallahi1,2,3 and the Airborne In Situ Measurements and Modeling Team of the ROMEO Campaign*
Hossein Maazallahi and the Airborne In Situ Measurements and Modeling Team of the ROMEO Campaign
  • 1Institute for Marine and Atmospheric research Utrecht (IMAU), Utrecht University, Utrecht, the Netherlands
  • 2Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research (TNO), Utrecht, the Netherlands
  • 3Department of Renewable Energies and Environment, College of Interdisciplinary Science and Technologies, University of Tehran (UT), Tehran, Islamic Republic of Iran, (h.maazallahi@ut.ac.ir)
  • *A full list of authors appears at the end of the abstract

Romania’s oil and gas infrastructures belong to the strongest CH4 emitters in Europe. Despite this, quantification of emissions in the region has been limited. During the large multi-scale ROMEO (ROmanian Methane Emissions from Oil and gas) campaign in 2019, top-down methane emission estimates were derived using in-situ measurements from two aircraft, supported by two atmospheric model simulations.

Annual emissions from the Southern Romanian Oil and Gas (O&G) infrastructure were estimated at 227 ± 86 kt CH4 yr⁻¹ resulting in a per-site Emission Factor of 5.3 ± 2.0  kg CH4 h-1 site-1. This is consistent with previously published ground-based site-level measurements conducted during the same period. Low wind conditions during the campaign complicated direct comparisons of individual plumes between measurements and the model simulations. Nevertheless, correlations of CH4 plumes observed during large-scale raster flights and mass balance flights with modelled plumes suggest that the emission factors derived for a limited number of production clusters and regions are representative for the larger southern Romanian production basin.

Our results show agreement between aerial and ground-based estimates and corroborate significant underreporting of methane emissions from Romania's O&G industry to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 2019. Furthermore, the study highlights substantial underestimation of O&G emissions in the Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR) v7.0 for the study domain.

Airborne In Situ Measurements and Modeling Team of the ROMEO Campaign:

Foteini Stavropoulou (1,4,5), Samuel Jonson Sutanto (1,6), Michael Steiner (7), Dominik Brunner (7,8), Mariano Mertens (9), Patrick Jöckel (9), Antoon Visschedijk (2), Hugo Denier van der Gon (2), Stijn Dellaert (2), Nataly Velandia Salinas (4,5), Stefan Schwietzke (4,5), Daniel Zavala-Araiza (4,5), Sorin Ghemulet (10), Alexandru Pana (10), Magdalena Ardelean (10), Marius Corbu (10), Andreea Calcan (10,11), Stephen A. Conley (12), Mackenzie L. Smith (12), Thomas Röckmann (1)

How to cite: Maazallahi, H. and the Airborne In Situ Measurements and Modeling Team of the ROMEO Campaign: Airborne Measurements and Modelling of Methane Emissions from Oil and Gas Industry During the ROMEO Campaign 2019, EGU General Assembly 2025, Vienna, Austria, 27 Apr–2 May 2025, EGU25-4728, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-4728, 2025.