Differentiated gas buyers are keen to understand the environmental impact of the gas product throughout the supply chain. Voluntary market certifications can verify to others that your differentiated product is truly differentiated throughout its life cycle. This verification is vital in a voluntary market, where bad actors may claim fraudulent climate accounting data. Certifiers signal trust and legitimacy in a burgeoning market with little oversight. They guarantee the reliability of a product by using “bottom-up” data–emissions data collected at the industry site and in the atmosphere–and “top-down” data–data formulated by calculating averages and projections–in harmony.
Certifiers like Project Canary, Equitable Origin, and MiQ push beyond the lowest standards for methane emissions set by regulators and allow companies to demonstrate mitigating efforts that go above and beyond local, national, and international requirements.
Project Canary is best known for its use of continuous monitoring technology, which continuously monitors methane emissions over long periods of time, detecting large emission events known as “super-emitter” events. The company is unique in that it sells its own cutting-edge technology for continuous monitoring. To prevent conflicts of interest, Project Canary sells certification services even to customers that buy certification equipment from other vendors: “its core product...is not the hardware but the data.” In the past, Project Canary-backed products have been chosen over competing ones due to the certification’s rigor. Methane-conscious European LNG buyer Engie rejected NextDecade, a Texas LNG producer, over firms backed by Project Canary in 2022.
MiQ assesses emissions across broad gas-operating areas rather than at individual facilities. MiQ requires companies seeking its certification to undergo periodic, but in most cases not constant, emissions monitoring. It then uses a proprietary algorithm to categorize that gas into one of its six grades of methane intensity: A, B, C, D, E and F. According to an interview with Canary Media and MiQ’s CEO, “MiQ’s goal is less to measure emissions with pinpoint accuracy than to push companies to cut those emissions. ’We’ve got to create these competitive tensions in the markets,…so people start to abate.’” MiQ has become the certifier of choice for a handful of big gas producers, including BP and ExxonMobil.
Equitable Origin is a non-profit organization that seeks to make sure new development projects, from wind farms to natural gas wells to hydroelectric dams, are carried out responsibly and with respect for local people and environments. They partnered with MiQ in March 2022.
While these certifiers posit different methodologies for differentiated gas standards, they represent the important principle of third-party verification in the voluntary market space. Both Project Canary and MiQ as leading certifiers are pushing companies to higher standards of methane abatement and enabling transactions in the market.