From Mandate to Momentum: Methane Regulation, Measurement, and Market Opportunity

For years, methane was framed mainly as a climate warning, a compliance burden, or a reputational test for the oil and gas industry. That framing helped elevate the issue and made methane visible to regulators, investors, and the public.
But it is no longer enough for the phase the industry is now entering.

Methane management is becoming something more practical and more consequential. It is becoming an operating discipline.

This matters because methane is both an emissions issue and a source of lost product, lost value, and visible operational weakness. For operators, the central questions are whether emissions can be detected reliably, quantified credibly, corrected quickly, and reduced consistently across assets and over time.

The change in tone was evident in reporting from the recent CERAWeek by S&P Global held in March in Houston. Methane was discussed in the language of operations, including measurement quality, data lineage, inventory reconciliation, field response, and the challenge of scaling from pilots to routine performance.

The technology discussion also reflected a more mature view of the problem. Instead of centering on one device or one survey method, speakers outlined a layered approach to measurement. Strategies discussed included satellite and aerial screening to identify priority areas, site-level monitoring to improve visibility, field verification to confirm sources, and operating data to determine cause and corrective action.

Another signal mattered as well. Even when methane was not the dominant political headline, work on measurement and mitigation appeared to be continuing. Taken together, these are meaningful signs that progress is being sustained by better measurement, stronger operating logic, and a growing recognition that methane performance says something fundamental about asset quality and management discipline.

Methane Performance and Asset Quality

When methane is discussed in terms of surveillance architecture, response workflow, and verification, it has moved beyond rhetoric and into the domain of engineering management.

This is one reason methane deserves closer attention than it sometimes receives in broader transition debates. Few issues align environmental benefit, operational efficiency, and commercial logic as clearly.

Methane that escapes does not reach the market, while methane that is detected earlier can often be addressed sooner. Methane performance that can be demonstrated credibly is increasingly relevant to regulators, buyers, investors, and partners. In this sense, methane is becoming a test of asset quality and supply credibility.

Better tools are helping drive the changes we see happening today. Operators now have access to a wider set of detection and quantification options than they did only a few years ago.

While these tools do not eliminate uncertainty, and no single method sees everything, they are improving visibility into emissions that previously went unmeasured or undetected for too long. That is changing what good methane management looks like.

We believe effective methane programs require six elements.

• Layered detection: No single measurement method is sufficient across all assets and operating conditions. Screening, confirmation, and follow-up must work together.
• Measurement-informed inventories: Reported emissions must increasingly be reconciled against observed emissions rather than treated as static assumptions.
• Clear detection-to-repair workflows: Finding emissions matters only if there is ownership, prioritization, and documented corrective action.
• Root-cause reduction: The goal extends beyond fixing isolated leaks. Programs also need to identify recurring failure modes in equipment, operations, and maintenance practice.
• Credible assurance: Data lineage, auditability, and independent verification are becoming more important as methane performance carries greater regulatory and commercial weight.
• Operational transparency and accountability: Methane management should support health, safety, environmental stewardship, and credible disclosure across internal and external stakeholders.

We see a turning point coming in which methane management is becoming part of mainstream asset management. It belongs in routine operating review, maintenance planning, abnormal-condition response, and performance accountability. Companies should treat it as a controllable production loss with external consequences, rather than as a separate sustainability add-on.

Regulation, Markets, Collaboration

Policy and markets are also pushing in this direction. In Europe, methane is moving into a more evidence-based regulatory framework through the Regulation (EU) 2024/1787, which entered into force on 4 August, 2024.

For importers, the framework phases in obligations over time, including:

• Qualitative reporting from 5 May 2025.
• Equivalent monitoring, reporting, and verification requirements, or OGMP 2.0 Level 5 plus verification, from 1 January 2027.
• Methane-intensity reporting begins on 5 August 2028.
• Methane-intensity requirements from 5 August 2030.
• In December 2025, the European Commission also emphasized pragmatic implementation aimed at predictability, market certainty, and security of supply. For gas suppliers, especially liquefied natural gas suppliers into Europe, methane performance is therefore becoming more relevant to market access, contract positioning, and supply differentiation.

Canada offers another useful example. On 25 March 2026, Canada and Alberta announced an agreement in principle toward an outcome-based methane equivalency framework, which targets a 75% reduction below 2014 methane levels by 2035 in Alberta. It also relies on an independent, jointly selected third party to assess emissions reductions and commits Alberta to publish information on covered methane sources and its reduction approach.

Further, the new agreement calls for corrective action if reductions are not achieved as expected. That is a more mature regulatory conversation than one based solely on uniform prescription. The real test is whether emissions are measured credibly, reduced meaningfully, and reported transparently.

There is also a broader lesson. Methane performance is becoming a collaboration challenge as well as an operator challenge.

It will take collaboration amongst different companies, measurement vendors, regulators, buyers, and verifiers to solve the credibility problem. Reconciling top-down observations with bottom-up inventories, improving comparability across assets and jurisdictions, and building confidence in reported outcomes all require more aligned efforts across producers, technology providers, importers, governments, standards bodies, and independent assurance actors.

We view collaboration as part of the infrastructure of credible performance. That matters even more as supply chains become more visible and cross-border expectations grow. The EU framework is explicitly extending methane accountability into imported supply chains, while the Canada-Alberta agreement builds on transparency, third-party assessment, and corrective-action expectations.

Methane management remains difficult. Emissions are often intermittent. Super-emitters can distort totals. Top-down measurements and bottom-up inventories do not always agree. Site conditions vary widely. Smaller operators may face resource and staffing constraints. Verification protocols are still evolving and for all the progress in detection, quantification and comparability remain imperfect processes.

That complexity should not be used as an excuse for inaction. It should, however, help bring discipline to the conversation.

The next stage of methane management will involve systems that are repeatable, auditable, and scalable.

The industry should update its framing of methane accordingly. Early alarm helped raise the issue. The questions being raised today are becoming more practical.

Can an operator see emissions earlier? Can it distinguish material events from background noise? Can it respond quickly? Can it reduce recurrence? Can it prove results with confidence? These are engineering questions. They are also strategic questions.

For an industry that prides itself on measurementand operational improvement, methane should be treated as a practical test of execution. The companies that perform well will be the ones that build better measurement architecture, shorten detection-to-repair cycles, improve inventory accuracy, strengthen data lineage, and show credible reduction over time.

Methane management is entering a new phase and we see new standards emerging. Producers, regulators, and markets are asking for fewer promises and more proof. They are looking for performance that can be measured and verified over time. This is a constructive process that is unfolding and one that we expect will deliver transparent and sustainable results.

Willow Liu, SPE, is the vice-chair of the SPE Methane Technical Section, and a member of the board of the SPE Sustainable Development Technical Section. She is also the chief scientist of MEDENG, a flow research and technology company.

Linda Battalora, SPE, is the technical director of the SPE Health, Safety, Enivironment, and Sustainability discipline and past chair of the Methane Technical Section, Sustainable Development Technical Section, and Diversity and Inclusion Committee. She is a teaching professor in the petroleum engineering department at the Colorado School of Mines.