Determination and Reduction of Methane Emissions of the Gas Distribution Grid in Germany

Methane emissions are increasingly meaningful in public debates for political, administrative, and public stakeholders and can have significant impact on the future of natural gas. The different approaches for emission estimation in place cause difficulties to identify the methane emissions in the countries correctly and put the gas industry in a difficult situation. The GERG project MEEM (finished in July 2018) developed a methane emission estimation method for the gas distribution grid which can broadly be applied in Europe. The results of this GERG project now have to be implemented on a national level. Therefore, the DVGW project “Determination of Methane Emissions of the Gas Distribution Grid in Germany (ME DSO) was initiated in August 2018.

The aim of the project is the determination of national emission factors for pipelines and facilities such as pressure regulating stations through the development of a coordinated measuring programme and the subsequent implementation of the measurements.

Work includes:
- Review the availability of data and recommendations for future procurement
- Determination of the necessary measuring range to achieve statistically safe results, recommendation of a measuring method and presentation of the providers
- Maximum 20 initial measurements within the project budget, others as third-party funds
- Central collection, management and evaluation of measurement results
- Evaluation of the data/measurement results with the help of statistical models

The project results should be available in spring 2021.
In parallel another DVGW project (ME-Red DSO) is conducted which should investigate the measures for methane emission reduction in the gas distribution grid and should develop guidelines how these measures can be broader implemented by the German distribution system operators in the future. This project should be finished in summer 2019 to include the results in the project ME DSO.

The presentation will give an overview about the work packages and timelines for the projects ME DSO and ME-Red DSO.