Events Calendar

Sahar El Abbadi, Postdoctoral Researcher, Sustainable Energy & Environmental Systems, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, will be presenting, "Decarbonizing Wastewater: Strategies for Estimating and Reducing Methane Emissions."

Wastewater treatment is essential for public and environmental health, yet it contributes to climate change through methane and nitrous oxide emissions. Reducing the climate impact of this sector requires both accurate measurement technologies and economic incentives to capture and utilize greenhouse gases. In this talk, I will present strategies for reducing methane emissions from wastewater treatment. First, I will present results from a nationwide emissions inventory, in which we find that methane accounts for 45% of wastewater treatment emissions, and facilities with anaerobic digesters are responsible for leaking 17 million tons of CO₂-eq/year, outweighing the climate benefits of on-site energy recovery. Additionally, total emissions are 25% higher than current national government wastewater inventories, highlighting the need for improved emissions quantification. I will then explore opportunities for using novel methane sensing technologies—including satellites, aircraft, and ground sensors—to refine emission estimates. Finally, because research to-date has largely focused on large, centralized wastewater treatment systems, I will also discuss opportunities for future work addressing emissions from decentralized systems, particularly rural treatment lagoons, which remain an overlooked but potentially meaningful source of national methane emissions.