OGMP 2.0 — The Definitive Reference

What OGMP 2.0 is — and who runs it

The Oil & Gas Methane Partnership 2.0 is the United Nations Environment Programme’s flagship methane reporting and mitigation programme for the oil and gas industry. It is voluntary, principles-based, and — uniquely among methane frameworks — built around direct measurement rather than generic estimation. Companies that join commit to reporting their Scope 1 methane emissions annually, across both operated and non-operated assets, using the most accurate methods and science-based measurement available, and to improving the granularity of that reporting year on year until source-level inventories can be reconciled against site-level measurements.

The partnership has a specific lineage. The original Oil and Gas Methane Partnership (OGMP) was launched by the Climate and Clean Air Coalition (CCAC) at the UN Secretary-General’s Climate Summit in 2014. In November 2020, UNEP, CCAC, the European Commission, the Environmental Defense Fund, and an initial cohort of 62 oil and gas companies re-launched it as OGMP 2.0 — a substantially more ambitious framework that connects reporting directly to mitigation. The programme is now administered by UNEP’s International Methane Emissions Observatory (IMEO), the body that collects, reconciles, and publishes the reported data.

The measurement layer over methane reporting

OGMP 2.0 is best understood not as a competitor to corporate GHG accounting standards but as the measurement discipline that sits underneath them for one specific gas in one specific sector. A GHG Protocol inventory tells a company how to classify and total its emissions; OGMP 2.0 tells it how good the underlying methane numbers have to be. The two are complementary layers, not alternatives.

Scope — operated, non-operated, and the value chain

OGMP 2.0’s scope is deliberately broader than the operational-control boundary most companies default to for Scope 1 reporting. Members commit to report methane from both operated and non-operated assets, including joint ventures in which they hold an interest but do not run day-to-day operations. This is the single most operationally demanding feature of membership: it forces companies to obtain credible methane data from partners they do not control, which is why the framework allows a longer runway for non-operated assets than for operated ones.

The gas of interest is methane specifically, reported as a Scope 1 direct emission and separately from the carbon dioxide that combustion produces. Because the framework is measurement-led, it categorises emissions by how they physically occur — venting, fugitive leakage, flaring, and incomplete combustion — rather than by the equipment-centric taxonomies used in bottom-up factor inventories. That physical framing is what makes site-level reconciliation possible at Level 5.

The five reporting levels

The five-level scale is the heart of OGMP 2.0. It is a data-quality ladder: each rung demands more granular, more empirical, and more defensible methane data than the one below. Levels 1–3 are estimation tiers; Levels 4–5 are measurement tiers. The framework’s entire design intent is to move companies up the ladder over time, not to reward staying put at a level that looks complete but rests on generic factors.

Source categories and the Level 3–5 mapping

Because OGMP 2.0 categorises methane by how it physically escapes, the same category vocabulary runs through every reporting level — what changes up the ladder is the quality of the number attached to each category. The categories derive from the International Association of Oil & Gas Producers (IOGP) taxonomy: five for upstream operations, three for midstream and downstream.

How the levels map onto measurement practice

Reconciliation — Level 4 versus Level 5

The single conceptual leap in OGMP 2.0 is the move from Level 4 to Level 5, and it is worth stating precisely because it is the feature most often misunderstood. Level 4 is a bottom-up inventory: you measure or sample individual sources and sum them. Level 5 adds a top-down measurement — an independent read of a whole site’s emissions, taken from a vantage that sees everything at once (aircraft, drone, tower, or satellite) — and then reconciles the two.

Materiality — the 5% rule

Not every asset must reach Level 5. OGMP 2.0 uses a materiality threshold to focus measurement effort where the emissions actually are. Assets whose methane emissions represent less than 5% of a company’s total portfolio emissions are treated as immaterial and are not required to reach Level 5 reporting. This concentrates the expensive, measurement-intensive work on the assets that dominate the footprint, consistent with the heavy-tailed distribution of methane emissions across a portfolio.

Materiality is assessed at the portfolio level, which means it is dynamic: as a company drives down emissions from its largest assets, previously immaterial assets can cross the 5% line and pull new assets into the Level 4/5 requirement. The framework’s logic is self-tightening by design — mitigation success at the top of the portfolio raises the bar for everything below it.

The Gold Standard and the Gold Standard Pathway

“Gold Standard” is OGMP 2.0’s designation for the target state of reporting: all material assets reported at Level 4 and Level 5, backed by a defined methane reduction target. It is not a badge a company claims on day one — it is the destination of a phased implementation plan with hard deadlines that start ticking the moment a company formally joins.

Member commitments and the annual reporting cycle

Membership carries three standing commitments and one fixed annual rhythm. The commitments are simple to state and demanding to deliver.

IMEO, MARS and the assurance process

Reported data does not simply go into a filing cabinet. UNEP’s International Methane Emissions Observatory (IMEO) runs reported OGMP 2.0 data through a structured assurance process and integrates it with independent data streams — satellites, scientific measurement studies, and national inventories — to build an open, empirically verified dataset of oil and gas methane emissions. IMEO is a core implementing partner of the Global Methane Pledge, the effort by more than 150 countries to cut global methane emissions 30% by 2030.

Sitting alongside the annual reporting cycle is IMEO’s Methane Alert and Response System (MARS) — a satellite-based detection system that identifies large methane plumes and super-emitter events and notifies the relevant operators and governments so they can act. MARS is the near-real-time complement to OGMP 2.0’s annual inventory: the inventory characterises the baseline, MARS catches the large intermittent events between reporting cycles.

Methane reduction targets — intensity or absolute

OGMP 2.0 requires a methane reduction target but does not dictate its form. Companies choose between an intensity target and an absolute target, and the choice has real consequences for how growth interacts with the commitment.

GWP basis — why the methane time horizon matters

Methane is a short-lived but potent greenhouse gas, and converting a mass of methane into carbon-dioxide-equivalent depends heavily on the chosen time horizon. This choice is more consequential for methane than for any other common gas, and any credible methane report must state which basis it uses. The operative reference for corporate reporting is IPCC AR6 (2021).

The values above are hardcoded historical references to the IPCC AR6 assessment as it reads today; the full set of AR6 factors, including biogenic methane and the climate-carbon-cycle-feedback variants, is maintained on the AR6 GWP-100 dataset. For the conceptual background on why the time horizon dominates methane’s CO₂e, see the reference on global warming potential. OGMP 2.0 reporting is expressed in methane mass; the CO₂e conversion is applied downstream when the number enters a corporate GHG inventory or disclosure.

The regulatory cascade

OGMP 2.0 was designed as a voluntary initiative, but its measurement architecture has become the reference point for a wave of binding methane regulation. The framework’s levels and reconciliation logic increasingly appear, explicitly or implicitly, in the MRV requirements that regulators are writing.

OGMP 2.0 and corporate GHG accounting

For a sustainability or inventory team, the key integration question is how OGMP 2.0 methane numbers flow into the broader corporate carbon inventory. The answer is clean, because the two frameworks operate at different layers.

The practical workflow is to treat OGMP 2.0 as the methane data-quality engine and the corporate standard as the accounting frame. Companies running a fugitive and process-emissions programme will find that OGMP 2.0 Level 4/5 work produces exactly the source-attributed, measurement-backed methane data that a defensible Scope 1 inventory needs — and that a stationary-combustion inventory alone never captures, because combustion factors say nothing about venting and fugitive losses.

Level locator — self-assessment

Use this to place your current methane reporting against the OGMP 2.0 ladder. Check every statement that is true for your material assets today. The tool identifies the highest level you can defensibly claim and the gap to Gold Standard.

Common implementation errors

Frequently asked questions