Why India is flying blind on coal mine methane

India is heading into the monsoon season, and with it will come the thick clouds that blind the satellites that can measure methane emissions from space. For a few months each year, the country’s own reported emissions are the only measure of how much methane actually leaks from its coal mines. 

The trouble is that there is often a large gap between officially reported numbers and what satellites can see.

Improvements in current emissions reporting and better integration of atmospheric measurements are key to giving India a clearer picture of coal mine methane emissions and enabling it to act accordingly to mitigate them. 

Even with the discrepancies between reported numbers and satellite measurements, as the world’s second-largest coal producer, India is now one of the biggest sources of coal mine methane.

For a country that was recently home to 98 of the 100 hottest cities, managing methane, which has a warming impact 80 times that of carbon dioxide over a 20-year timeframe, is an urgent need.  

Capturing coal mine methane is not just an environmental need; it also offers economic benefits.

Much of the methane leaking today simply remains untapped, even though it could fuel local townships, be fed into the electricity grid, or earn credits through destruction. 

For example, 100,000 households and nearly 500 businesses were supplied by capturing coal emissions in communities near Jincheng mines in China.

Australians utilise methane to generate electricity and shift from diesel generators in North Queensland.  

Measuring Emissions  

The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates India underreported its coal mine methane emissions by 67 % in 2024, or roughly 67 million tonnes (Mt) of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) over a 20-year period. This single year’s gap is more than the annual CO2 emissions of Denmark and Norway combined. Given the scale of these reporting gaps, it is important to understand the two ways methane emissions are estimated. 

One way is “bottom-up” emissions reporting, which combines mine activity data and emission factors to approximate coal mine methane emissions at a country level.

The other is “top-down” emission estimation, which relies on atmospheric measurements of methane from aeroplanes or satellites. These approaches use bottom-up data as a starting point and compare it with their observations.  

The two methods are complementary. The top-down approach draws on “bottom-up” emissions inventories as inputs, while independently flagging blind spots, outdated emission factors and other gaps in reported figures. 

The strongest arguments for a country's accurate national emissions reporting are transparency in bottom-up emission methodologies and agreement with atmospheric observations from space. 

Shortcomings in Reported Emissions 

India’s contribution to the global methane emissions has been notoriously difficult to quantify. This stems from heavy cloud cover during the monsoon season and difficulties in quantifying emissions from surface mining.  

Efforts to independently estimate India’s coal mine methane emissions using top-down approaches yield mixed results. In the years 2019 and 2023, India’s reported emissions were underestimated by 25 % and 67 % relative to top-down figures.

In contrast, it was 57 % lower in 2021.  These deviations point to the bottom-up emissions reporting as the likely source of the inconsistencies. 

Integrating Measurement Methods   

Fixing India’s coal mine methane emissions measurements requires an approach that integrates “top-down” estimates and “bottom-up” reporting and has the two methods talk to each other.

The biggest improvement to current bottom-up emissions would come from greater transparency in emission reporting and a shift away from generalised emission factors towards direct, site-level measurement and verification, such as the EU Methane Emissions Regulation (EU MER) framework.

Other countries are doing just that by shifting to measurements at the mine-level and regularly comparing national emission reports to the eyes in the sky.  

In India, lack of mandates to continuously measure, report and mitigate emissions and regulatory roadblocks are the main obstacles.

This is exemplified by emission measurements at the mines being labelled proprietary information, preventing independent scrutiny.

Knowledge gaps and capacity building play an important role too, but come second to the regulatory bottlenecks currently present.  

Satellites can do more than expose the problem; they can help solve it. Imagery from instruments such as Tanager-1 and TROPOMI should be used not merely to find gaps in official figures but to fix them.

They can help by pinpointing regions where emission factors are stale and individual mines where on-the-ground measurement should come first. Pairing better disclosure with smarter use of space-based observation is how India can get a single trustworthy picture of its methane emissions. 

Ultimately, India can only manage the methane it measures. The country can understand its emissions, with credibility, only by bridging the gap between what it reports and what the skies measure. 

(Disclaimer: The views expressed are personal and does not reflect that of the editorial. The author is an Earth Observation Scientist at Ember.)