Low-Hanging Plumes: An Investor's Guide to Methane

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We spent the last six months asking a simple question that turned out not to be simple at all:

If so much methane can be cut quickly and cheaply, why isn’t it happening - and what can investors do about it?

Our award-winning report tackled this among other hard questions for  First Sentier MUFG Sustainable Investment Institute's new report Low-Hanging Plumes: An Investor’s Guide to Methane (first link), supported by First Sentier Investors and MUFG.

Consider this. Analysis by the IEA and UN in 2023 suggests that feasible cuts to methane in the fossil fuel sector alone could deliver the same temperature reduction as immediately deleting all global CO₂ emissions from heavy industry. Yes, you read that right.

As with any scenario built on hard numbers, they’re probably precisely wrong. But they would need to be extravagantly wrong not to highlight a crucial opportunity: to take meaningful heat out of the atmospheric system within years, not decades.

The report evaluates mitigation options across the four main methane sources; oil & gas, coal, agriculture and waste, drawing on interviews with climate scientists, industry insiders and methane specialists. It distils the genuine “big wins”, is clear-eyed about the governance and measurement failures holding progress back, and ends each sector deep-dive with a practical investor cheat sheet.

Two actions stand out:

1. Engagement

Reinforce the normalisation of keeping valuable methane in the pipe at oil & gas companies, especially National Oil Companies. You are pushing at an open door. In today’s political environment, methane efficiency does not challenge their business model. The energy transition will happen with or without them.

2. Policy

Imperfect as it is, the EU Methane Regulation is the only serious attempt left standing that aligns with what the science says is needed. It is already lurching under pressure - from trade partners, energy-security arguments, and those who find accurate measurement inconvenient. Urge the EU to prop it up, and ensure any revisions still meet the scientific objective: rapid, durable reductions in real-world emissions.

If methane is the emergency brake on warming, this is one of the moments where we find out whether we’re prepared to pull it.