French oil and gas company TotalEnergies plans to implement continuous methane monitoring devices at its production facilities in Azerbaijan by the end of 2025, the company's Senior Vice President for Exploration and Production in Europe, Jean-Luc Guiziou, said in an interview with Report.
He noted that the installation of such systems is part of TotalEnergies' global strategy to reduce harmful emissions, including as part of the transition to more sustainable and green energy.
"We have a strong belief that, as an industry, we have a leadership role to play in cutting down the emissions of our current energy of oil and gas. That is particularly true for methane emissions. We see it as an urgency, short-term priority, to slash methane emissions. So that's why in 2022 we have set ourselves the objective of cutting down by more than 80% our methane emissions from all our installations worldwide by 2030, as compared to 2020, with an important milestone of cutting that down by 50% by 2025.
Actually, in 2024, we have achieved more than that milestone. We have achieved 55% of methane emissions reduction, so it is one year ahead of schedule. We have set ourselves a new target for 2025, which is to go beyond 60% of emissions reduction. But we want to go one step further, and we have set ourselves another challenge worldwide for 2025, and that is to deploy on all our installations across the world continuous methane monitoring devices on all of the installations to permanently monitor any single source of methane, whether fugitive, coming from flaring or venting, and to be able to act quickly in case there is even a small fugitive methane emission," he said.
"So we'll do that by deploying more than 13,000 devices across all of our installations. We're looking at doing it as well on our Absheron installations here in Azerbaijan. And we are committed to get this done by the end of the year. This massive deployment of devices that exists today, I think it's a pioneering move for the industry. We are proud as a company to lead the way towards being as diligent as possible in our own operations. We will keep working with our Azerbaijan partners to share our best practices, in particular in permanently monitoring and cutting methane emissions," he added.