Every tonne of blast-furnace steel carries methane that could be destroyed for a few euros. COP31’s two hosts are holding the key to that fix. Here is what it would take to use it.
By Juneia Mallas & Kaj Embrén · The Methane Brief · Issue No. 21 · October 2026 · 7 min read
A gigatonne hidden in steel
Look up at a wind turbine. The tower is steel, and most of the worldʼs steel begins in a blast furnace fed with metallurgical coal. That coal comes out of the ground surrounded by methane, and most of that methane is simply vented to the sky.
The same is true of the car in the driveway, the beams in a new hospital and the rails of a high-speed line. The energy transition is being built, quite literally, on coal mine methane.
The UN Secretary-Generalʼs new Call to Action on Methane puts the scale plainly. Mining metallurgical coal releases around 12 million tonnes of methane a year. At the Methane Briefʼs 20-year standard of 82 times the warming power of CO₂, that is close to one billion tonnes of CO₂-equivalent, roughly Japanʼs entire annual emissions. Source: UN Secretary- General’ s Call to Action on Methane ( 2026 ); GWP 20 from IPCC AR 6 .
The UN report then adds a line that should stop every steel buyer, finance minister and climate negotiator in their tracks. Those emissions, it says, “can be mitigated at just one per cent of the cost of steel.”
“Continued inaction is no longer a matter of uncertainty or lack of information – it is a deliberate choice.”- UN Secretary General's Call To Action On Methane
A choice, not a mystery
The reportʼs central message is that methane is no longer a problem of knowledge. Satellites can now pin a plume to within 50 metres of its source. UNEPʼs alert system sent more than 5,000 warnings across 33 countries by February 2026. In 2025, only 12 per cent drew a response.
In fossil fuels, it says, the barriers “are not technological, but regulatory, financial and political.” Nowhere is that truer than in coal. Ventilation air methane (VAM) oxidation, pre-mining drainage and proper mine closure are proven and available. Yet coal gets one paragraph in the executive summary, and a single bullet among the nine priority actions, tucked beneath oil and gas leak repair: “Make methane mitigation a standard industry practice in coal mining.”
The fullest case is buried deeper in the report. There, the authors note that metallurgical coal methane “remains largely overlooked in steel decarbonisation efforts”, even though that coal “will be needed for several decades, even in rapid global decarbonisation scenarios.”
So the question is not whether this methane can be cut. It is who moves first, and what would make them.
Two hosts, one fix
From 9 to 20 November, the worldʼs climate negotiators gather in Antalya for COP31. Türkiye holds the presidency. Australia presides over the negotiations. Methane is not a standalone item on the negotiating agenda. It runs instead through the mitigation talks and the Global Methane Pledge, which is precisely why a move by the hosts would matter.
Both hosts know coal methane at first hand.
Australia is the worldʼs largest exporter of metallurgical coal. Its gassy underground mines feed blast furnaces across Asia, and the methane released in extracting that coal stays on Australiaʼs national ledger. New South Wales has already done something rare. Under guidance finalised in March 2026, its environmental regulator expects the largest gassy underground mines to have ventilation air methane abatement on at least one shaft by July 2030, and to abate three-quarters of that methane from 2032. The crediting method that would make that mandate pay has still not been written.
Türkiye mines its own hard coal in the Zonguldak basin, the gassiest coal basin in the country. The country learned the human cost of firedamp in 2022, when an explosion at the Amasra mine killed 43 miners. In coal, methane is a safety problem before it is a climate problem. Abating it serves both.

One host exports the problem. The other mines it at home. Together they steer the summit at which the world expects methane to move. That is not an embarrassment to be managed. It is an opening.
What it takes: a rule, a price, a buyer
The reportʼs best evidence for what works comes from oil and gas, not coal. Norway banned routine flaring in 1971, taxed methane emissions from petroleum production in 1991 and raised that tax in 2017. It now has one of the lowest methane intensities in the world. If every producer matched it, the report says, global oil and gas methane could fall by roughly 90 per cent.
Norway did not wait for a better technology. It set a rule and put a price on failure. Coal mine methane needs the same two things, plus a third that oil and gas has never needed so badly: a buyer who asks.
A rule. The report calls coal mine methane a “fix-it-first” opportunity. It asks governments to mandate mine-level measurement and public reporting, time-bound mitigation plans for high-emitting sites, and enforceable methane management after closure. New South Wales shows that such a rule can be written. Most coal-producing jurisdictions have not yet written one.
A price. A mandate without a revenue stream asks operators to carry the whole cost of a public good. Oxidising ventilation air methane destroys gas too dilute to sell, so the project only pays if the avoided emissions do. That means a crediting method, a compliance value or a concessional loan. In NSW, the absence of a crediting method is the gap between a mandate on paper and an oxidiser on a shaft.
A buyer. This is the lever the report almost names. Its third priority action calls for a global methane intensity standard, with compliance a condition of “financing, procurement and long-term market access.” It is written for oil and gas. Extend it to metallurgical coal, and steelmakers become the market signal.
They have reason to listen. Methane from mining their coal sits in their supply chains, as Scope 3 emissions, yet it is rarely reported. Ember estimates that counting it would raise reported Scope 3 emissions by about 50 per cent for ArcelorMittal Europe, 49 per cent for POSCO and 23 per cent for Nippon Steel. Hydrogen and carbon capture at the steel plant cannot touch any of it. That methane can only be cut at the mine. A green steel claim that ignores the mine is a claim with a hole in it. A buyer that asks for low-methane coal closes the hole, and gives the mine a reason to invest. UNEPʼs Steel Methane Programme is already building the mine-level database that would make such a benchmark enforceable.
The Antalya package
COP presidencies are judged by what they leave behind. Australia and Türkiye could leave something small, specific and real: a coal methane “fix-it-first” package, tabled by the hosts and open to any country that mines or buys metallurgical coal.
It would need only three commitments:
1. Measure every mine. Mine-level methane measurement and public reporting, aligned with the data UNEP is already gathering.
2. Make abatement pay. A crediting pathway or compliance value for destroyed methane, so a mandate becomes an investment case.
3. Let buyers ask. A low-methane benchmark for metallurgical coal that steelmakers and their customers can write into contracts.
None of this needs a new technology. None of it needs a new treaty. It needs two governments to decide that the methane in their own seams is worth the few euros a tonne it would cost to destroy. Methane lasts about a decade in the atmosphere. Cut it now, and the slowdown in warming arrives within the lifetime of the turbines being raised today. The world can already see the plumes from space. The only thing still missing is the decision, and in November, two hosts will be holding the pen.
T H E N U M B E R S - The one per cent, checked
UNEP puts the cost of abating metallurgical coal methane at around one per cent of the cost of steel. On the UN’s own figures, the real share is closer to a few tenths of a per cent.
~9 kg of methane in every tonne of blast-furnace steel
~€2.25 to abate it, per tonne of steel
~0.3% of the price of a tonne of steel
How we got there
Methane per tonne of steel. 12 million tonnes of methane a year from metallurgical coal, spread over about 1.34 billion tonnes of blast-furnace steel, gives about 9 kg per tonne.
Cost to abate it. At about €250 per tonne of methane destroyed, 9 kg costs about €2.25.
Share of the steel price. Against Northern European hot-rolled coil at about €722 a tonne (21 August 2026), that is about 0.3%.
The gassier case. Mines in gassier seams sit well above the average. At an illustrative 15 kg per tonne, the cost is about €3.75, or 0.5%. Still well under one per cent.
Five to seven times. That is how much climate damage each euro of abatement avoids, measured against the US EPAʼs 2023 estimate of the social cost of methane (about $1,500–1,940 a tonne).
Reporting, interviews and sourcing by Juneia Mallas & Kaj Embrén. Drafted with AI assistance; fact-checked and edited before publication.
The Methane Brief · Issue No. 21 · October 2026
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