Overview

Cutting fossil fuel methane is one of the fastest levers to slow global warming, yet a transparency gap persists. Asset-level tracking is essential to identify mitigation wins and opportunities, hold operators accountable, and turn climate pledges into action.

Methane emissions from the coal, oil, and gas sectors remain a critical challenge to global climate targets. Despite peaking demand for fossil fuels, the continued buildout of extraction infrastructure, such as proposed oil and gas fields coming online before 2030, threatens to undermine progress under the Global Methane Pledge. These potential emissions significantly outpace the figures reported by many operators participating in the U.N.’s flagship watchdog agency, the Oil and Gas Methane Partnership 2.0. As the only free and public database providing estimates for gas pipelines and Liquid Natural Gas (LNG) terminals worldwide, these data allow for the identification of high-emission assets, such as the Incheon LNG Terminal in South Korea and the Texas Eastern Transmission Gas Pipeline in the United States. 

In the coal sector, GEM’s data products illustrate the infrastructure and operators responsible for methane output across the globe as well as their mitigation efforts. Estimates for over 5,000 mines show that proposed projects could emit over 15.7 million tonnes annually. Analysis of every high resolution, publicly available remotely-sensed methane plume near coal mines as of mid-2025 has successfully associated over half of these events with specific in-mine infrastructure elements. 

By combining these findings with companion datasets on coal mine boundaries and mitigation projects, it is now possible to track how mine operators manage gassy ventilation shafts and degasification stations. This asset-level transparency provides the essential evidence needed to drive attribution and mitigation efforts across the fossil fuel lifecycle.