Increased methane emissions from oil and gas following the Soviet Union's collapse.

ABSTRACT: Global atmospheric methane concentrations rose by 10 to 15 ppb/y in the 1980s before abruptly slowing to 2 to 8 ppb/y in the early 1990s. This period in the 1990s is known as the "methane slowdown" and has been attributed in part to the collapse of the former Soviet Union (USSR) in December 1991, which may have decreased the methane emissions from oil and gas operations. Here, we develop a methane plume detection system based on probabilistic deep learning and human-labeled training data. We use this method to detect methane plumes from Landsat 5 satellite observations over Turkmenistan from 1986 to 2011. We focus on Turkmenistan because economic data suggest it could account for half of the decline in oil and gas emissions from the former USSR. We find an increase in both the frequency of

SUBMITTER: He TL 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10963001 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature