Methane emissions from natural gas end use in residential, commercial, and institutional buildings in Canada

Unofficial AI-generated summary based on the public title and abstract. Not an official translation.

🔬研究者:Provides empirical measurement methodology and data to improve methane emission factors for building end-use.

🏢実務担当者:Building owners and gas utilities can use these findings to identify and prioritize leak detection and repair programs.

🏛政策担当者:Indicates that post-meter emissions are underestimated in inventories and may be a cost-effective target for methane regulations.

Abstract Fugitive leaks and stationary combustion from natural gas (NG) end use (post-meter) in buildings contribute to emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Fugitive leaks from appliances and piping and emissions from exhaust vents have been measured at residential buildings in the U.S. and China, but thus far, no published measurements from residential and commercial/institutional buildings in Canada are available. Here, we conducted chamber-based measurements of fugitive methane leaks from 49 NG appliances (water heaters, boilers, furnaces, and others) in residential and commercial/institutional buildings and exhaust vent emissions associated with 10 NG appliances (boilers and furnaces only) at a gas technology training centre. We found fugitive per-appliance post-meter emission rates to range from 0.0014 to 1,271 mg/hr with a mean of 913 mg/hr, which is 2.0 to 2.5 times higher than the emission factor used in Canada's National Inventory Report (NIR). However, our sample was biased toward commercial and institutional buildings; and the few measured residential grade appliances were low-emitting. Moreover, 98% of these fugitive emissions were from associated piping, rather than from the appliances themselves. For exhaust vent emissions, our mean per-appliance emission rate (0.88 kg/yr) was 20% higher than the NIR emission factor based on appliance-specific heating capacity and three to five times higher than NIR emission factors based on NG consumption. Therefore, the use of NG consumption for stationary combustion post-meter emissions may be one of the reasons behind previous studies finding post-meter emissions in inventories to be underestimated. With methane emissions from oil and gas production actively being reduced, post-meter NG emissions are increasingly becoming an important source of methane emissions and may be a good target for methane mitigation policies in Canada and elsewhere.

• crossref https://doi.org/10.1088/2634-4505/ae80f5first seen 2026-06-24 05:48:23