Letter from the Executive Director
ONE Future is pleased to publish its seventh Annual Methane Intensity Report, reflecting another year of progress, leadership and collaboration in reducing methane emissions across the natural gas value chain.
Our report shows a material decrease in emissions intensity year-over-year – a 21.3% decrease, indicating that our members’ emissions are dropping even as they work to deliver more natural gas to consumers in America and abroad.
Since inception, ONE Future and its members have focused on continuous improvement and sharing of best practices. The work is not glamorous, and it often takes time to demonstrate results, but it has again proven that our approach is valid, based in science, and driven by a performance-based protocol.
Over the past few years, our members have:
- Accelerated deployment of detection and measurement methodologies;
- Increased the use of measurement-informed data;
- Identified and shared best practices in a dynamic environment; and
- Led the way in reinventing natural gas systems, such as the upgrading of pneumatic devices.
Yet, we are not done and our commitment to continuous improvement is unwavering. We’ve crushed our 2025 targets routinely and now is the time to look to the future and answer how our collective leadership can best serve the goals of energy and climate security.
This year we engaged ICF International to update ONE Future’s landmark 2016 Marginal Abatement Cost Curve analysis. Our work last year to inventory the technologies and practices employed by our members demonstrated a 700% increase since 2016. We are digging into the data to understand where opportunities remain to drive cost-effective emissions reductions. And in 2025, we will set our next targets for emissions intensity across six segments – including the addition of LNG – and the value chain, based upon science and a steadfast commitment to continuous improvement.
Our path ahead also includes leading and collaborating with other organizations.
Since ONE Future’s founding, we’ve partnered with organizations and agencies ranging from the EPA to GTI Energy to make progress on our shared goals. We worked with the EPA to develop the ONE Future protocol when our coalition was originally formed. Since then, we have collaborated with GTI Energy to create a methodology to validate methane intensity on an individual company basis and we’re currently working with the DOE, State Department, EPA and global partners in Asia and Europe to advance a global framework for monitoring, measurement, reconciliation and validation (MMRV).
At our annual meeting back in the Spring, we heard from several of these partners, along with our own members, who are leading the industry on a bright path forward. Just this past Fall, I was reminded of the strength of partnership yet again at the Energy Emissions Modeling and Data Lab’s annual event, where scientific inquiry and collaboration were key as we envisioned the path forward for natural gas.
In this pivotal year ahead, I look forward to continued partnership and collaboration as we work toward our shared energy future.
Sincerely,
Jim Kibler
Executive Director
