Challenges and next steps

The report advocates for Australia to adopt satellite-based top-down verification for methane emissions to complement existing bottom-up estimates. It highlights the TROPOMI satellite's ability to provide frequent global daily coverage, making it suitable for verifying emissions across clustered coal mining areas despite its lower spatial resolution compared to point-source imagers. The document cites Canada's use of a hybrid reporting framework as a successful precedent and notes that 91% of Australia's annual coal production occurs in regions well-suited for such monitoring. It also identifies a need for spatially distributed methane inventories, noting that the Safeguard Mechanism's shift in April 2024 to report methane quantities rather than CO2-equivalent will facilitate these comparisons.

• Australia's current emissions quantification for coal production relies primarily on bottom-up estimates, and incorporating satellite estimations is presented as a necessary addition for national and subnational verification processes.
• Canada serves as a precedent for this approach, having integrated satellite-based estimates into its resources sector emissions inventory through a hybrid framework that uses an ensemble inversion top-down method and tower-based measurements to verify facility reporting.
• The TROPOMI satellite instrument is identified as an effective tool for Australia because it provides global daily coverage of methane concentrations, which is better suited for national or basin-level verification than point-source imagers that lack the necessary frequency of coverage for annual reports.
• Australia is geographically well-suited for satellite monitoring due to clear skies and bright, flat surfaces, with an estimated 91% of its annual coal production located in regions favorable for methane monitoring.
• Comparing satellite data to reported emissions in Australia has been hindered by the reporting of mine-level emissions as CO2-equivalent (CO2e) rather than methane; however, the Safeguard Mechanism began releasing reported methane as methane quantities in April 2024 to address this.

APA

Ember (2025). Challenges and next steps. https://ember-energy.org/chapter/challenges-and-next-steps/

Chicago

Ember. Challenges and next steps. 2025. https://ember-energy.org/chapter/challenges-and-next-steps/.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |author=Ember |title=Challenges and next steps |date=16 April 2025 |url=https://ember-energy.org/chapter/challenges-and-next-steps/ |access-date=17 August 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{ember2025challenges, author = {{Ember}}, title = {{Challenges and next steps}}, institution = {Ember}, year = {2025}, month = apr, url = {https://ember-energy.org/chapter/challenges-and-next-steps/}, urldate = {2026-08-17}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }