Satellite monitoring of annual US landfill methane emissions and trends

Abstract

We use satellite observations of atmospheric methane from the TROPOMI instrument to estimate total annual methane emissions for 2019-2023 from four large Southeast US landfills with gas collection and control systems. The emissions are on average 6$\times$ higher than the values reported by the landfills to the US Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program (GHGRP) which are used by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for its national Greenhouse Gas Inventory (GHGI). We find increasing emissions over the 2019-2023 period whereas the GHGRP reports a decrease. The GHGRP requires gas-collecting landfills to estimate their annual emissions either with a recovery-first model (estimating emissions as a function of methane recovered) or a generation-first model (estimating emissions from a first-order-decay applied to waste-in-place). All four landfills choose to use the recovery-first model, which yields emissions that are one-quarter of those from the generation-first model and decreasing over 2019-2023, in contrast with the TROPOMI observations. Our TROPOMI estimates for two of the landfills agree with the generation-first model, with increasing emissions over 2019-2023 due to increasing waste-in-place or decreasing methane recovery, and are still higher than the generation-first model for the other two landfills. Further examination of the GHGRP emissions from all reporting landfills in the US shows that the 19% decrease in landfill emissions reported by the GHGI over 2005-2022 reflects an increasing preference for the recovery-first model by the reporting landfills, rather than an actual emission decrease. The generation-first model would imply an increase in landfill emissions over 2013-2022, and this is more consistent with atmospheric observations.