An evaluation of historical methane emissions from the Soviet gas industry
Bibliographic record
Abstract
An inventory of natural gas losses from the former Soviet Union's gas industry has been constructed from published Russian‐language sources. The results imply that in the late 1980s/early 1990s annual losses from Russia were in the range 35–59×109 cubic meters (24–40 Tg of CH4): estimates based on what are thought to be the more reliable sources place annual losses in the range 37–52×109 cubic meters (25–35 Tg of CH4). Of this amount, one half to two thirds of the emissions may have been from the extremely long and ageing gas pipeline system. Extrapolation of the estimates for Russian losses to the whole territory of the former Soviet Union suggests a probable total annual emission level from the whole ex‐Soviet gas industry in the range 47–67×109 cubic meters of natural gas or 31–45 Tg of CH4 in these years. The envelope of minimum and maximum estimates for emissions from the former Soviet Union ranges from 29 to 50 Tg of methane. The limited availability of systematic and accurate published information on the emissions introduces significant uncertainty into the estimate. In an attempt to constrain emissions better, estimates of losses from specific causes were made using two or more independent approaches, where possible. A reasonable agreement between estimates was achieved in those cases. Our results imply that substantial reductions in emissions could be achieved by investment to reduce losses. Because of the high global warming potential and short lifetime of methane compared to carbon dioxide, reducing the large losses from the FSU may be among the most cost‐effective short‐term approaches available to reduce global anthropogenic greenhouse warming.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".