Measuring greenhouse gas emissions can be costly and this expense may prevent small carbon trading projects from getting off the ground, a leading South African researcher said on Monday. Under the Kyoto Protocol, which aims to cut emissions of gases linked to climate change, projects in developing countries can trade or sell credits, from reductions they make in carbon emissions, to companies in developed nations that have to meet Kyoto-enforced limits.

Covering landfill sites and trapping the methane they would have released is one option being adopted in developing countries to tap into this new market -- but amounts are not easy to measure. "Measuring methane accurately can be expensive... A smaller project would certainly need to do a cost/benefit analysis," said Stuart Piketh, director of the Climatology Research Group at Johannesburgs University of the Witwatersrand.

"Your initial capex (capital expenditure) cost for the equipment could run to about a million rand (US$140,000). And then annual maintenance costs could be 50,000 to 60,000 rand per year plus the costs of measuring," he told Reuters on the sidelines of a carbon trading seminar organised by PricewaterhouseCoopers. "It can be difficult to calculate off a landfill site what your methane emission would be, how much of the material that is going in there is really organic and would break down," he said.

"How do you capture all the methane gas in that landfill site? How do you make sure that you have only one outlet for that gas? Once you have done that, which is going to be a fairly costly exercise, you then need to measure what the tonnages are," he said. He said nitrous oxide, associated with big incinerators, was another greenhouse gas that was difficult to measure. But carbon dioxide (CO2) was easier to measure accurately and projects that cut coal consumption would fall under this category.

"On a CO2 project you can do a really accurate mass balance calculation. If you know the combustion efficiency of your process, you can calculate your CO2," Piketh said. "If you know the tonnage of coal going into your system and you know how much carbon is in that system, then you can calculate what the CO2 emmission will be," he said.
(Por Ed Stoddard, Planet Ark, 04/07/2006)