22 - Greg Ross

Greg Ross is a senior climate analyst at Cheniere Energy, where he focuses on greenhouse gas measurement, mitigation, and verification across the North American natural gas supply chain. A Houston native now based in Washington, DC, Greg brings a rare combination of deep technical expertise and genuine climate motivation to his work—shaped in part by his background in chemical engineering and liberal arts at the University of Texas at Austin. With experience in electricity modeling, supply-chain emissions analysis, and industry-leading methane measurement initiatives, Greg offers an insider’s perspective on how the oil and gas sector is evolving to meet modern climate challenges. 

Connect with Greg on LinkedIn. 

Books

• One Thousand Vines by Pascaline Lepeltier

Other Energy Concepts & Definitions

• OGMP 2.0 (Oil and Gas Methane Partnership 2.0) 
• EEMDL – Energy Emissions Modeling & Data Lab 
• Fugitive Methane Emissions 
• Emission Factors 
• Interconnection Queue 
• Mercaptan 
• QMRV (Quantification, Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification)

Transcript

[00:00:00]

Kiersten: All right. Hey pod people. Welcome back for our next episode. Today we're joined by Greg Ross. Greg is a senior climate analyst at Chenier Energy, where he focuses on greenhouse gas measurement and mitigation across the natural gas supply chain, including its quantification, monitoring, reporting, and verification, or QMRV. and A native Houstonian and current resident of Washington, DC. Greg is a proud Longhorn having majored in chemical engineering and plan two Honors at the University of Texas at Austin, another Texan for the books. Welcome to the Pod, Greg.

Greg Ross: Hello, and thank you for having me on. I'm really excited to talk with y'all today.

Aparna: Cool. Gotta say it. Hook 'em. Horns. Happy to have you here Greg. Can you walk us through how your time at UT Austin shaped the path that eventually led to your role at Chenier?

Greg Ross: Yeah, absolutely. So I studied chemical engineering and the liberal arts at the University of Texas, and our chemical engineering program was pretty [00:01:00] focused on the oil and gas industry. But, by my third year of undergrad, I knew from. The research group that I was a part of, as well as a climate change seminar that I took, and then later TA'ed, that if I was gonna go into the energy industry, I wanted to work in the lane of climate. And so I think my time at the University of Texas really gave me a lot of diverse viewpoints to really understand how the industry works technically through coursework and, you know, through networking exposure. But then also to get that rounder side thinking about the implications of the positive and negative consequences of using different energy sources and how that affects society.

And what makes, life and society meaningful and why those other issues are important. So, I think of my time at UT as having spent a lot of time in a large playground and there were a lot of toys that were [00:02:00] available. to see a few different sides of the, oil gas industry.

Kiersten: I love uh, thinking about it. As a giant playground. So that was your education. What other roles have you had before the one that you're in currently?

Greg Ross: Yeah, so I started with this company right out of undergrad. At the university, I spent about four years in a research group where I focused on electricity modeling in the state of Texas and the interconnection queue of renewable resources waiting to be developed. But then, from there joined Cheniere Energy, which liquefy and exports natural gas. I started at the company intentionally in a rotational role where I worked on a variety of commercial teams, including the company's strategy team. But the whole time I knew that I was gonna end up at the company's new climate strategy team that would focus on greenhouse gas emissions. Both at our companies facilities, as [00:03:00] well as thinking about the supply chain of greenhouse gas emissions throughout the US natural gas sector North American natural gas sector .

Aparna: So the first question that comes to mind with hearing that, hearing your background and the obvious desire to work in climate and sustainability, many people assume that climate work typically happens in NGOs or renewables. I'd love to hear what drew you to working on sustainability from inside the natural gas industry.

Greg Ross: Yeah, that's a great question, and I asked myself that a lot when I was deciding whether or not to work at Cheniere. I think ultimately I decided to work at the company because I knew that given my experience, I was in the position to both understand the industry, but also be a climate motivated professional. And so I thought that I could uniquely add my labor to think about climate issues from this place. I do think that, because of the complicated nature of greenhouse gas emissions and climate change, it's [00:04:00] really important the work that nonprofits and governments do that represent the non-commercial interests that are affected by the issue. And it's important for them to hold the industry accountable. But I do think that there are a bunch of professionals in the oil and gas industry who are focused on issues like climate change or other environmental consequences of oil and gas development that are motivated to mitigate the environmental footprint so that, industries like these can continue to provide the goods and services that they do, but minimize some of those externalities.

Kiersten: Excellent. So as that uniquely positioned climate focused professional in the oil and gas natural gas industry, what's the biggest misconception you hear about the industry itself and its role in the energy transition?

Greg Ross: Yeah, that's a good question. I think two things come to mind.

The first is that, I think it's a misconception in my opinion, that energy [00:05:00] is morally good or bad, but rather I think it's more complicated and there are trade offs and there are positives, which can mean accessible energy and the benefits that provides to industry and quality of life and comfort. But then negative trade-offs like pollution and the release of greenhouse gas emissions that create a warmer and more unpredictable world. but I think a misconception is that and this is probably more of an opinion than a misconception, but that any energy resource is uniquely good or bad, but rather you should evaluate it based on what you're trying to achieve and see how, where you can mitigate the negatives and improve the positives.

An example that I come back to frequently is that coal, which now we recognize to be one of the particularly dirty forms of energy probably saved a lot of the world's forest from being cut down because it was a more energy dense [00:06:00] source of heat than burning biomass. Obviously that calculus has changed and it doesn't make sense frequently in the environmental sense to prioritize coal production and usage, even if there are some positive trade-offs like economic security or having large stockpiles of fuel ready . So I would say that's the first misconception. The second misconception, and I won't drill down into this too deeply, but that's more technical in my field, which is oil and gas supply chain emissions, where there's been a lot of positive focus on emissions in the production sector. IE the part of the supply chain focused on extracting oil and gas from the ground. But one important finding that we found and we've published our results, is that: even though those are significant emissions, the rest of the supply chain, like the gathering of gas, the processing of it, the transmission of it by pipeline, the liquefaction and the shipping also contribute [00:07:00] substantially to the overall supply chain emissions. And so when people are thinking about supply chain emissions in the oil and gas sector, they shouldn't just focus on the production sector as important as that sector is.

Aparna: I think you bring up a great point of nothing happens in a vacuum. So your job, my job, Kiersten's job, we all have so many other context clues that we have to put in to get that full picture of overall positive and negative, like what you're saying. So I think a very useful lens through which to look at liquified natural gas and emissions associated with the industry.

Speaking about emissions, you did talk about measuring emissions, and since that's such a big part of your job, I'd love to hone in on that a little bit more. So for those of us outside the field, can you walk us through how you and your team actually go about measuring and verifying methane emissions across such a big supply chain that you oversee?

Greg Ross: Yeah I really appreciate that question. And so you said measuring and verifying, and those are the two big words. [00:08:00] They have very different components to them. The measuring side with natural gas. So natural gas, depending on where you produce it, is primarily composed of methane from, you know, 80% to, 95 plus percent. Methane. And as a result, when you're moving it, you're frequently one, burning it along the way in order to get the energy, in order to power the movement and the liquefaction of the gas. But two, every piece of equipment that you have is touching that gas.

So there emissions can come from intentional sources that you need in order to move it, and then unintentional sources, which we call fugitive methane emissions, a type of those are leaks. The measurement technology that companies have to consider need to contemplate both the intended and unintended release of the product that's in the system the entire way.

And because it's a gas and, you know a flammable gas at that, there's a lot of safety equipment associated with it [00:09:00] to prevent, the incidents or explosions. or things As a result, these pressure relief systems lead to yet another unintentional path where even if things are working as intended they could be leading to greenhouse gas emissions.

So what measurement technologies do you use? In the last five years, there's really been an explosion in the number of technologies and there's been a much broader uptake of these sort of methane measurement technologies that range from aerial mounted laser systems that use lidar or light detection in order to attempt to create visualizations and localizations of plumes of methane emissions, to drone mountain sensors to cameras that you can install on your site that are either using lasers or optical frequencies that are tuned to methane specifically or fence line sensors that kind of work, like smoke detectors. Each of these technologies has [00:10:00] positive and negative trade-offs on how effective they are for detecting. And that's really been an interesting development in the industry because prior to, the last five years, a lot of people's approach to identifying methane emissions were more based on traditional walking surveys where, maybe you have a handheld optical gas imaging camera, and then maybe when you find a leak with that camera, you can put a bag on top of the leak or vacuum up the leak in a piece of equipment called a high flow sampler and just try to estimate the quantity that way. But now we've evolved where there's all these different technologies mounted on these different platforms like poles and planes and drones that give a lot more insight and information about the true source and the true magnitude of these methane emissions

Kiersten: Wow, Greg, that is quite the list of technologies. Still have to talk about verification though, so tell us what's up with that.

Greg Ross: Yeah. hard as the measurement [00:11:00] pieces, I'd say the verification piece is even more challenging because it's this new ecosystem of measurement technologies with that variety that we just talked about. And how do you then interpret that data in order to make some representation that the public would care about?

Like, how many emissions is this asset, or is this company actually emitting and can we trust that number? Because you can imagine all the technologies that I'm talking about, measuring the concentration of methane in the air or some variant of that metric. And then are doing a combination of atmospheric modeling or statistical analysis in order to infer a mass rate of methane emissions.

And then the analyst who's looking at this data has, this point in time measurement and has to extrapolate that over time and across different spaces across space and time in order to come up with say company level annual [00:12:00] inventory. How do you do that and how do you have standards within that analysis and interpretation? And that's where the verification piece comes in. And That's actively being worked on by a few entities in large part motivated by the European Methane Emission Regulation, which was passed in August of 2024, which was the European Union's attempt to acquire is their attempt to acquire data about upstream methane emissions imported into the EU market, and that regulation has a requirement for reasonable assurance, which means something very specific in the audit industry for that data that European importers are collecting from upstream suppliers. And so now there then a small proliferation of really smart and technical institutions that are thinking, okay, how can we create verifiable standards for these measurement technologies [00:13:00] such that your traditional bread and butter auditors who have no experience with this niche technical field of methane emissions, could come look at what a company's done and confirm that they've actually interpreted the data correctly. And that's a really challenging problem, but it's a fun one.

Aparna: Thinking out loud, is it almost like coming up with emissions factors like that kind of a industry-wide standard that people. Agree upon?

Greg Ross: Yeah. That's a really good question. And so Emission factors are one approach benefit of an emission factor which for instance, let's say you have a piece of equipment and you just assume it emits a one ton of methane emissions per year, and that one ton assumption is based off of a scientific study across a bunch of different sites. The advantage of that is it's really simple and really verifiable. And for a while, was the structural foundation of the USS Regulatory Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program [00:14:00] which currently is being reconsidered, but, when in place allowed for a variety of methods, including emission factors multiplied by what we call activity factors, like how many pieces of equipment do you have, or what operations are those equipments using. So yeah, that's the advantage, really reproducible. And if we could build to a world where we used emission factors, that'd be great. The downside of emission factors is that the actual emissions profile of different companies, of different assets have empirically shown to be variable. Very variable to the extent that many people going back, more than a decade at this point, have large scale empirical campaigns that show that these emission factor based estimates have systematically underestimated the scale of methane emissions across the world and including in the United States. That has led to this desire for measurement based, which is much more difficult to verify, but the public could potentially have greater confidence that the number's actually right versus an [00:15:00] easier to verify emission factor that may be different from the real world performance of this equipment.

Aparna: Okay. Okay. Positives and negatives with both of them. Thank you for breaking that down. I was trying to relate it to something that, we use in our daily lives. Maybe something that folks are more familiar with. So I appreciate you highlighting the similarities and the differences with that. And I think we'll give the listeners a little bit of time to chew over this and we'll walk into a little mid episode break.

[00:00:00]

Kiersten: Taking it back to our conversation with Greg, we will be verifiably thankful for anyone that chooses to support the pod by getting themselves a little Christmas book treat. But for Greg. We're gonna be treated to some more methane knowledge. So we've talked a little bit about the technologies for methane measurements and some of the verification processes, but what's it gonna take to get everyone on board and in agreement that measuring and reporting their methane emissions is is necessary?

Greg Ross: That's the question that the Europeans, a nd many other stakeholders across the world are keenly invested in. Probably the most successful and the largest initiative internationally is this UN run voluntary program called OGMP 2.0, and that stands for the Oil and Gas Methane Partnership 2.0, which has over Over [00:01:00] 150 companies as well as some non-company members like the European Commission and some environmental NGOs where the companies have agreed to voluntarily report methane emissions using measurement data, data that's higher quality than most of the emission factors that in much of the world where there's no regulatory reporting operation obligations and, in the United States exceed what companies would be required to do otherwise to comply with EPA regulations. And this framework was intentionally developed to be flexible in order to encourage innovation and facilitate knowledge sharing and risk-taking among companies that were agreeing to voluntarily report this data to the UN and have the UN review their measurement plans and then assess whether or not the companies were indeed you know, reaching the gold standard of measurement reporting. So I think the next step, and this ties back to what we were talking [00:02:00] about with the European Methane emissions Regulation, is how do you marry this flexible innovation fostering framework with a standardized method?

Some of the entities that are working on this I'll just name one of them, is, the Energy Emissions Modeling and Data Laboratory or, MDEL, which is a consortium of three universities, university of Texas at Austin (Go Horns!), Colorado State University, and the Colorado School of Mines. But one thing that MDEL is working on is to create a verification protocol focused on the European methane emission regulation. In that process is taking the learnings that these hundreds of companies have learned as well as academic partners that have frequently worked with companies in order to study oil and gas, methane emissions and greenhouse gas emissions, take that information and create a protocol that could be relied on for companies to represent their methane emissions.

Aparna: Thank you very much. Learned something new [00:03:00] about OGMP and Greg, we know at high level you lead Cheniere's voluntary emissions programs. You obviously have so much knowledge about the nitty gritty of everyday measurement verification, and what membership with OGMP really entails for the future of the industry.

So wanting to take it back to a more granular level, can you tell us what a day in the life for you looks like as a senior climate analyst?

Greg Ross: Yeah, a day in the life of a climate analyst at Cheniere Energy. So I work on a small team a great team. And we do, and I help our team coordinate, a variety of activities. We actually have to collect measurements. And so a lot of that is logistical, coordinating with aircraft vendors in order to faithfully fly over our facilities. Getting that data, analyzing and processing that data, and then ultimately reporting that data both internally and to external stakeholders like those in OGMP 2.0. On top of [00:04:00] that, our company provides what we call cargo emissions tags, which are essentially our best estimates of supply chain emissions.

So not just at our facilities, but based on analysis that we use, using a combination of public data as well as our commercial data and data that we've requested from our commercial counterparts. We put together life cycle estimates of greenhouse gas emissions of the gas that we purchase and our team, spends a lot of effort maintaining that model, updating it with new data. We've gone through the process of getting external verification of that data limited assurance in order to represent our best estimate of what greenhouse gas emissions are. Yeah, it's a lot of computer work and it's a lot of thinking about methane emissions. I guess if I'm being truly honest, I guess I really am full of hot air with the amount that it's just about thinking about methane.

Kiersten: Okay. You made a hot air joke, so I have to make my own corny joke. Where does 82% of the methane on earth [00:05:00] come from?

Greg Ross: Oh, I don't, am, I was gonna guess a combination of three or four things, but,

Kiersten: Okay. To be fair, I did not fact check this joke, but the answer is it comes from the "dairy air" We need to add a, the dumps. A little nugget of truth in the joke here is of course that methane from livestock can be a significant portion, I don't think it's 82%, so don't take that as a factoid listeners, but enjoy the dairy air pun. On that fun note - Rapid fire questions! Greg. This is a very serious topic and we are aware of that, but let's try to personify methane a little bit and continue the fun. Three quick questions for you. First, what's one methane fact that usually surprises people at dinner parties or would you know if you were having those conversations at dinner parties?

Greg Ross: I think, yeah . You mentioned the dairy air. Something that surprised me at least is, so agriculture emissions, particularly livestock, that's between a third and 40% of [00:06:00] methane emissions.

But the significant majority of that is actually not from the cow's dairy airs, but actually from their mouths, they burp the methane. That's what those four stomachs are for, to break down that grass and, get the energy out of that and release anything that is inefficiently consumed comes out the front. And so I think people are pretty interested to learn that we should be watching out about cow breath, not cow farts.

Kiersten: I love it. I'll never outgrow a joke about toots, if I'm honest. All right, next fast question. Methane is odorless and invisible. If you could give it a color or a smell to make people pay attention, which one would you choose and what would it be?

Greg Ross: that's that's a solved problem because it is, people do add mercaptan, a sulfur compound so that it smells like rotten eggs so that, you know something is wrong. If I were adding something, I would probably, yeah, keep it a smell. So that you know that if you have a leak somewhere. Now in the [00:07:00] industry.

This was interesting to me, another dinner party, unsolicited, fun fact. But when I was first visiting sites, the like standard test for most actual technicians or operators in the field to see if something's emitting, upstream where they're moving massive quantities, they haven't added sulfur yet, so it still is colorless and odorless. And so what they'll do is they'll do a soap test where they basically will just put soap water on top of equipment. If the gas is there, it will bubble and you'll see soap bubbles coming off of your equipment. so that's the sulfur easy way to check if something's leaking or if you've fixed it correctly.

Kiersten: Very reassuring both that industry is cautious about methane leaks and adding a smell. And If you aren't high tech, you can just use some old soap to make sure everything is fine. All right, last. Fun question. They're all pretty fun, right? But last one in this series is if methane were a person in the energy transition story, what kind of character would it be?

[00:08:00] Villain? Misunderstood sidekick? Or maybe something else entirely?

Greg Ross: Yeah, I think methane would be the character who comes in the third act and ends up being one of the main characters of the play, who was totally, who you weren't expecting the whole time. Everyone has to deal with their drama, as the play is resolving. And I say that because for so long the conversation about climate change and greenhouse gas emissions has been about CO2 which is the biggest and the largest contributor. And it wasn't really until, the work of a lot of people in the last 15 years to really spotlight that methane, contributes. Almost a third of the global warming of greenhouse gas emission. So the personality of methane is, they were there all along but you didn't realize that they were involved plot.

Aparna: The underdog that said hello. Don't forget me. I'm still here. . So I [00:09:00] was thinking about jokes too, and I have one to share. Some people might say fart jokes are immature, but I assure you there's a methane to the madness.

Greg Ross: Bravo!

Aparna: Thank you so much. Credit to Google, credit to Google.

Greg, besides the skill to make light of, industry topics, be relatable and always tell a good joke, if someone wanted to do what you do, are there any other skills or maybe certifications that you think are important for them to have?

Greg Ross: Yeah. And people should, there's uh both in the United States and globally, there's a lot of opportunity to make a difference. Thinking about methane emissions and oil and gas and other sectors I would say. since it's such a relatively new field there's not so much credentials that I've seen widely available.

But one resource I would recommend is actually from MDEL that Energy Emissions Modeling and data lab that I mentioned earlier, which for disclosure, my company, Cheniere, is a sponsor of and what MDEL d oes every year is put on a week long methane short course where [00:10:00] you can spend a couple hours a day for a week and listen to their academic experts overview. Really the lay of the land when it comes to methane emissions you know, starting broad and then really narrowing down onto the oil and gas sector. And so I would recommend looking at that institute. They have some resources publicly available at all times, and then they have that course .

Kiersten: In addition to resources that people can look up like that, that you just mentioned, you personally, have there been any specific mentors or role models that have really influenced your career thus far?

Greg Ross: Yeah, I, there definitely have, few people come to mind. I mentioned at the very beginning that I spent four years in a research group that was with professor Michael Weber at the University of Texas, who has done a lot of work about the intersection of energy, food, and water, but also thinking about internationally how energy systems are connected and I'd I'd say my time working with him and then keeping up with him afterwards has really been helpful to [00:11:00] put the work I do in context, and he's been an incredibly helpful, professional mentor.

I also think my current boss at Cheniere Fiji George is, at this point, a three decade veteran of greenhouse gas emissions in the oil and gas sector.

And there really aren't that many people who can say they've been looking at this issue for that long. And really has challenged me to push both, our company, as well as the industry, to credibly study this problem and to think outside of the box in order to come up with solutions that satisfy, stakeholders, both within the company so that it makes sense for them to take action, but then also the public so that they can trust the data that companies are putting out.

Aparna: It's nice to know that there are so many other people in the space that are also working towards similar goals, and I feel like my. Mentors really shape so much of how we treat work and our careers. So big kudos to them. So you've had some really stellar individuals and you've been able to learn a lot from them.

[00:12:00] Flipping it back on you, I'd love to know what legacy you hope to leave behind through your work.

Greg Ross: Yeah, that's another question that I am trying to spend more time thinking about. Yeah. I've been so focused, over the last four or five years thinking about, understanding the technical aspects of this space. And, when I think about it, like. When I think of the pie chart of global greenhouse gas emissions, I feel like I'm pretty safely ensconced within my, one to 2% of global emissions being methane emissions in the North American oil and gas supply chain.

And so I want to have contributed my part technically and from the industry and creating and adopting solutions to. and shrink that small slice of the pie to zero. as far as giving outwards, yeah, I think like at this point in my career, I'm thinking a lot more about how I can be helpful more to other students, you know younger people who are thinking about joining the space or with the organizations that my company is a part of, you know, making a difference [00:13:00] through our contributions, by sharing our learnings in ways that are easy to understand and can be adapted and become more durable.

Kiersten: Fantastic. I think we also echo. That desire, right to be a resource to young people. So it's always nice to meet fellows in that mission. With that in mind, we do love to ask our guests about resources that we can refer listeners to, one of which is books, and we do have a bookshop.org where we link all of the guests recommendations for easy browsing. So Greg, do you have any specific reading recommendations for our listeners?

Greg Ross: funny that you asked that. I am really coming up empty when it comes to b ooks that aren't, reports about the particular issue, that probably wouldn't be interesting to most of your listeners. Okay, I'm gonna go in a different direction and just say a book that's been really interesting to me in the sustainability field that I'm really excited to talk about. That is this book called 1000 Vines by Pascal Lapier. She is a [00:14:00] French sommelier who was actually a philosophy graduate student who got burnt out on philosophy and decided to get. Really into wine and just published this year, her sort of philosophical treatise about wine agriculture, and even though it's a book about wine really, the first third is just thinking about the biology of the of the grape plant and how it's been cultivated over time and the political and economic systems that have affected agriculture of the plant. Then the middle third is about the land. and its relationship to that to the wine. And then the third is actually about the wine making process itself. And that book just the way and it's so much more broadly applicable than just wine and grapes, but it's really opened my eyes and to the way that I. Interact with food systems and what I want from these systems in order to think about sustainable cultivation of the land [00:15:00] and sustainable and in cultivation of interests consumer interests and what we want and why do we use the language that we use to talk about these consumer products and how do we change that and so I could talk for another 30, 45 minutes on this topic, so I'll stop there, but I would highly recommend

Aparna: No, that's a good recommendation. I don't think we've had that before. we'll definitely link in on the bookshop. And honestly, I think it's just nailing the point that You need context for everything you do, right?

Everything has something that came before it came after it that's going around it. So can't do anything in a vacuum, which is good. It is all intertwined. So we will leave you guys. One more, one more pun. Well, this has been super fun, Greg. Thank you so much for your time.

I've loved learning more about your job, your day to day. I feel like every time I talk to one of my friends, I have no idea what they do. So thank you for explaining. Thank you for Mythbusting and sharing that, you know, methane is something we should all pay more attention to, [00:16:00] so thanks for the time. We can't wait to catch up with you in the future and I wish you good googling of more methane puns.

Greg Ross: Thank you again. Literally glad to have chatted with y'all.