Officials tell us why Egypt’s methane pledge is scoring high in oil and gas

4% of Egypt’s methane emissions — from oil and gas — has a baseline, a task force, and World Bank financing. The other 96%, from waste and agriculture, has none. Egypt’s First Biennial Transparency Report, submitted to the UNFCCC in December 2024, shows waste accounted for 66% of the country’s methane emissions in 2022, with agriculture responsible for another 30%. The energy sector — including oil and gas — accounted for just 4%, despite attracting the bulk of the country’s methane-specific investment and policy work.

SOUND SMART- Unlike carbon dioxide, methane (CH4) is both a pollutant and a product. Left to leak into the atmosphere, it traps roughly 80 times more heat than CO2 over a 20-year period — making it one of the most powerful greenhouse gases in the near term. Captured instead from landfills, livestock waste, or oil and gas operations, it can be processed into biomethane and used to generate electricity.

Petroleum has the receipts. The sector’s environmental compliance plan, energy-efficiency measures, and methane-abatement practices have cut emissions by some 1.4 mn tons, a government official in the petroleum sector tells EnterpriseAM. Flare gas recovery projects alone reduced emissions by 61.8k tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e), with the sector targeting another 49.4k tons next year, the official says.

The sector now has clear directives tied to Egypt’s international methane commitments, the official tells us — a claim the IMF backs up. Under its 2025 Resilience and Sustainability Facility arrangement with Egypt, the government committed to an MRV system for flaring and methane emissions, plus a forthcoming decree requiring firms to submit emission-reduction targets, with fines after a two-year grace period for noncompliance. Financing remains central to scaling emissions-reduction technologies, even as cooperation with private-sector partners progresses.

The World Bank’s own assessment of the sector lines up with the government’s figures. In a May 2025 project document obtained by EnterpriseAM, the Bank estimates Egypt’s oil and gas operations generate 41 mn tons of CO2e. Methane venting and leaks account for some 48% of that, with flaring responsible for another 14%. Up to 7 mn tons of CO2e could be cut in the short to medium term — an assessment the Bank confirms in its public GFMR Annual Progress Report, which notes it’s been helping Egypt identify and prioritize flaring and methane projects for grant funding.

The Oil Ministry has submitted four priority proposals to the World Bank’s Global Flaring and Methane Reduction Partnership. They target upstream methane emissions through vapor recovery units on storage tanks, recovery of associated gas that would otherwise be flared, permanent flare-measurement systems, and a nationwide leak detection and repair (LDAR) program. The LDAR proposal would build a dedicated task force inside the Ministry’s Center of Excellence for Energy Transition.

“The petroleum sector is mature,” CEO of BioRotterdam Ibrahim Farouk tells EnterpriseAM. Companies in the sector have organizational structures and measurable KPIs, he says — so when a methane project is implemented, emissions can be tracked before and after.

Waste has the know-how, not the structure. The technology is settled — organic waste methane can be captured through engineered landfills or anaerobic digestion units and then used as biogas for electricity or heat. The obstacle is that our waste sector is a patchwork of municipalities and private businesses, making coordinated action harder than in petroleum, where a handful of large players, sufficient financing, and international attention converge.

“What we are doing is control,” Farouk says — sealing waste in systems that capture the gas rather than letting it decompose into the atmosphere. His preferred solution, engineered landfill gas capture, requires most existing dumpsites to be upgraded to a standard they weren't built for. Source separation could help, but it has stalled for years without real incentives. What the sector actually needs, he argues, is concessional loans, streamlined procedures, tax breaks, or other financing tools — the same conditions the petroleum sector has and waste doesn’t.

The environmental side echoes the same complaint, in different words: finance. The slower availability of global climate finance has weighed on the pace of environmental projects, a government official in the environment sector tells us. More finance, the official says, would help accelerate global progress toward the pledge’s 30% methane-reduction goal by 2030.

Agriculture is the third bucket — and the least addressed of the three. Livestock (enteric fermentation and manure management) and rice paddy cultivation together account for 30% of Egypt’s methane emissions, according to the Biennial Transparency Report. Unlike petroleum, agriculture has no equivalent task force, no World Bank-linked financing pipeline, and no ministerial abatement program visible in public documents. The abatement pathways exist globally — feed additives, alternate wetting and drying for rice, and better manure handling — but implementing them in our fragmented agricultural sector faces the same structural obstacle waste does, in a more acute form.

OUR TAKE- Egypt hasn’t broken its methane pledge, but it’s aced the easy part of the test. Petroleum became the first mover because its emissions are easier to measure, its projects are easier to finance, and its companies are easier to regulate. The catch? Waste — despite being the country’s largest methane source — still needs stronger institutions, more private investment, and better project aggregation before it can catch up. Our methane strategy isn’t failing, but it is optimized for the part that was always going to be easiest.