How to Reduce Methane Emissions

Methane emissions can be reduced by sealing the leaks and deliberate releases at oil and gas sites, changing digestion and manure handling on farms, and capturing what landfills give off as waste breaks down.

Methane breaks down in the atmosphere in about 12 years while carbon dioxide lingers for centuries, so cuts made now show up in the temperature record within decades rather than lifetimes.

Which Sources Produce the Most Methane?

Agriculture produces close to half of human-caused methane worldwide, fossil fuel operations account for about 35%, and waste makes up most of the remainder. The Global Methane Budget puts total global methane emissions near 610 million tonnes in 2020, with human activity responsible for almost two-thirds of that and natural sources like wetlands responsible for the rest.

The United States ranks its sources in that same order. The Environmental Protection Agency puts agriculture first, natural gas and petroleum systems second, and landfills third at roughly 14% of human-related methane.

The fixes aren’t the same across sectors. A compressor station operator works on valves and vent stacks, while a dairy farmer works on feed and manure storage.

How Does the Oil and Gas Industry Cut Methane Emissions?

Oil and gas operators cut methane by sealing fugitive leaks, replacing equipment that vents by design, and making sure flares actually burn what’s sent to them. The International Energy Agency estimates that oil, gas, and coal production together released about 124 million tonnes of methane in 2025, and that roughly three-quarters of the oil and gas share could be eliminated with technology available today.

Fugitive leaks are unintentional releases from valves, flanges, connectors, compressor seals, and the access hatches on storage tanks. A single failed component can run for months before anyone notices.

Deliberate releases are the easier category to fix, because the equipment was designed to do it. Four changes cover most of the volume:

• Gas-driven pneumatic controllers replaced with instrument air systems or electric actuators. These devices open and close valves using pressurized natural gas as the power source, and they vent a small amount every time they operate
• Vapor recovery units installed on storage tanks, capturing the vapor that comes off crude and condensate as pressure drops instead of letting the tank breathe to the atmosphere
• Blowdown gas routed back into low-pressure lines or a recovery compressor rather than released when the equipment gets depressurized for maintenance
• Inert gas purging used to clear lines, which displaces the hydrocarbon without pushing it out the vent stack

Flaring burns off gas an operator can’t capture, process, or move to market. Burning it converts methane to carbon dioxide, which traps far less heat, so a working flare is a real improvement over venting the gas straight to the atmosphere.

The standard assumption is that a flare stays lit and destroys 98% of the methane sent to it, a figure that traces back to EPA-commissioned combustion studies in the 1980s.

Airborne sampling published in Science in 2022 tested that assumption across the Permian, Eagle Ford, and Bakken, which together account for more than 80% of U.S. flaring. Operating flares destroyed 95.2% of the methane on average, and once unlit flares were counted, effective destruction dropped to 91.1%. That gap works out to about five times more methane than the standard assumption predicts, or somewhere between 4% and 10% of all U.S. oil and gas methane.

Flares that go out and flares that burn incompletely both have straightforward fixes. Automatic re-ignition and pilot monitoring catch an outage in minutes rather than at the next site visit. Reducing the volume sent to the flare handles the incomplete burning, since gas that never reaches the stack can’t be partially combusted.

How Do You Find Methane Leaks?

Finding methane leaks means narrowing from the widest possible view down to a single component. Satellites flag the largest events across whole basins, aircraft and drones localize emissions down to the pad, and crews on the ground pin the release to a specific valve or fitting.

The International Energy Agency reports that satellites detected more than 5 million tonnes of methane from very large emission events in oil and gas operations during 2025.

On the ground, optical gas imaging cameras let a technician see a hydrocarbon plume as a dark cloud against the background, which turns an invisible problem into something a person can follow back to its source. Handheld analyzers then quantify what the camera found so repairs can be prioritized by size rather than by whichever leak someone spotted first.

How often a site gets surveyed matters as much as the equipment doing the surveying. Satellite monitoring found that large detectable emission events at oil and gas sites were present only about 15% of the time they were observed, compared with 47% at coal sites, which means an annual walkthrough at a gas facility can easily land on a quiet day and miss a release that shows up the following week.

Methane detectors lose sensitivity as their sensors age, so an old detector can miss a serious leak. Checking the detector against a certified methane standard before a survey—a step called a bump test—confirms it still reads accurately.

How Do You Reduce Methane From Livestock?

Livestock methane is reduced through three levers: better feed, additives that block the reaction, and breeding animals that produce less of it to begin with.

Cattle, sheep, and goats generate methane through enteric fermentation, the microbial digestion that breaks down tough plant material in the rumen. The microbes doing that work release methane as a byproduct, and most of it leaves through the animal’s mouth rather than the other end. Enteric fermentation is the single largest piece of agricultural methane, which is why it draws the most attention.

Feed that is more digestible means an animal converts more of what it eats into milk or muscle and less into methane, which lowers emissions per gallon or per pound.

Feed additives target the reaction directly. The Food and Drug Administration completed its review of Bovaer, a 3-nitrooxypropanol additive, for lactating dairy cattle in May 2024, and trials show methane reductions around 30% per animal. A full-lactation European study measured a smaller 21% reduction. The additive doesn’t reliably increase milk output, so adoption tends to hinge on whether carbon credit programs cover the cost.

Red seaweed works through a similar inhibition pathway. Short trials have reported reductions of 80% or higher, though longer feeding studies settle nearer 30%, and there are open questions about the active compound’s production cost and safety profile.

Breeding low-methane animals works slowly but permanently. Individual cattle vary in how much methane they produce on identical diets, and selecting for the low end has shown reductions around 22%, with the benefit lasting the animal’s whole life and carrying into its offspring.

How Do You Reduce Methane From Manure and Rice Fields?

Wet manure storage is where farm manure methane actually forms, because lagoons and slurry tanks create the oxygen-free conditions methane-producing microbes need. Drier handling produces far less.

Solid-liquid separation pulls the carbon-rich solids out before storage. On-farm testing across California dairies found methane reduction potential varying enormously by separator design, from under 10% for a basic scraped screen up to roughly 56% for a two-stage sloped dual-screen system.

Anaerobic digesters take the opposite approach by capturing the methane deliberately and burning it for power or upgrading it into pipeline gas. They work, with two caveats: U.S. digesters generally need a herd of several hundred cows to pencil out, and reductions get overstated when nobody accounts for leaks from the digester itself or methane still coming off the leftover digestate.

Manure acidification is common in Denmark, where lowering pH makes conditions hostile to the microbes that generate methane. Trial results range widely depending on acid type and dose, so it’s better viewed as a promising practice than a settled number.

Flooded rice fields generate methane the same way, through waterlogged soil that runs out of oxygen. Alternate wetting and drying lets fields dry between floodings, and global meta-analyses put the methane reduction anywhere from roughly 30% to above 50% depending on how aggressively the drying is managed. Drying does push nitrous oxide emissions up, which offsets part of the gain, though the net warming effect still lands well below continuous flooding.

How Do Landfills and Wastewater Systems Cut Methane?

Landfills cut methane with gas collection wells, tighter covers, and by keeping organic material out of the landfill in the first place. Municipal solid waste landfills sat third among U.S. human-caused methane sources at about 14.4% in 2022.

Landfill emissions models have long assumed a collection efficiency of 75%, but satellite-based research from Harvard put real-world performance closer to 50%, with measured emissions at some reporting facilities running well above what those facilities estimated.

How a landfill is covered largely determines how much gas the wells actually capture. The active area where trucks are still tipping waste gets only a thin layer of soil at the end of each day, and gas escapes straight through it. The EPA puts achievable collection at around 60% under daily soil cover, rising to 95% for sections finished under a proper final cover with wells drilled into them. That makes capping schedule and well density the levers that matter most.

Keeping organics out of the landfill removes the problem instead of managing it. The EPA attributes roughly 58% of U.S. landfill methane to food waste, so diversion programs, composting, and separate organics collection cut generation at the source rather than chasing it with wells afterward.

Wastewater treatment follows the same logic. Anaerobic lagoons and digesters at treatment plants produce methane continuously, and covering them turns a fugitive release into a collected fuel stream.

Which Methane Reductions Pay for Themselves?

The International Energy Agency estimates that more than 35 million tonnes of fossil fuel methane could be avoided at no net cost based on 2025 energy prices, because captured gas gets sold instead of released.

The cheapest reductions are the simple repairs. Sealing a failed component or relighting a flare costs little and returns gas that can be sold, while digesters, gas gathering infrastructure, and vapor recovery systems tie up capital and pay back over years.

If you’re considering options for reducing methane emissions at your own operation, reach out to us at WestAir and we can point you in the right direction.

Lawrence Haynes

Lawrence is the Marketing Director at WestAir Gases & Equipment in San Diego, CA