S&P Global Commodity Insights to update US Basin methane intensity methodology

The S&P Global Commodity Insights Analytics team will update its methodology for calculating US Basin-level methane intensity values, effective April 21, 2025.

Four key methodology changes are going to be implemented as follows:

1. Methane Attribution to Production: Within a given area of interest (AOI) observed methane may be from many different sources. To allocate observed methane to the production of oil and gas, an attribution methodology was developed by the Center of Emissions Excellence. This attribution methodology assigns a portion of the observed methane emissions within a basin to upstream oil and gas production, natural gas gathering, natural gas processing, natural gas transmission and storage and distribution. The attribution is based upon the proportion of US EPA reported (based upon gridded emissions reported in the 2018 GHGI using the GHGI Version 2 https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.3c05138 maasakkers et al., 2023) methane emissions for each of the segments over the same AOI as observed methane is analyzed. The result is a unique set of attribution percentages for each basin. Previously, all observed methane was allocated to natural gas production.
2. Co-product treatment: Both oil and gas are coproduced at the well level in many instances. A portion of the methane emissions will be allocated to the crude oil based upon an energy ratio of crude to total production. Previously, reported gCH4/MMBtu values were assessed assuming all of the observed methane was associated with natural gas production, leaving the coproduced crude oil emission free.
3. Global warming potential: The global warming potential will be updated to be based upon the IPCC AR4 100-year GWP for CH4 of 25 to be consistent with other work done at S&P on the natural gas and crude oil value chains. Previously a GWP of 87 times was applied according to the IPCC AR4 20-year value.
4. Methane content of natural gas: Where gas composition data exists, methane content in the natural gas will be varied by basin rather than assuming a consistent 83% as in the previously assessed methane %.

These changes are expected to have a significant impact on the methane intensities currently reported. The average differences between the new and the current calculations are -70% for the tCH4/MMBtu values, -91% for the tCO2e/MMBtu values and -58% for the % values.

Examples of the magnitude of impact can be found below:

The following symbols will be affected:

Platts Methane Intensity Premiums

Platts, part of Commodity Insights, publishes monthly methane intensity values for 19 US regions and utilizes information from the analytics team to calculate daily Methane Intensity Premiums.

The methodology changes to the methane intensity values by the S&P Global Commodity Insights analytics team will therefore have a downstream impact to Platts' Methane Intensity Premiums.

A full list of crude Methane Intensity values and premiums published by Platts can be found in the Carbon Intensity Assessments Specifications Guide linked here.

Please send all questions, comments and feedback regarding the methane intensity values to emissionexcellence@spglobal.com, and to Platts_Carbon@spglobal.com and PriceGroup@spglobal.com for anything related to Platts' Methane Intensity Premiums.

For written comments to Platts_Carbon@spglobal.com and PriceGroup@spglobal.com, please provide a clear indication if comments are not intended for publication by Platts for public viewing.

Platts will consider all comments received and will make comments not marked as confidential available upon request.