The European Commission has this week signed up to the Methane to Markets Partnership, an international coalition designed to accelerate adoption of methane-capture technologies.

The international group consists of 20 national governments and aims to improve and promote methane recovery systems capable of trapping methane and burning it to generate power. The coalition is particularly focused on driving adoption on methane-capture systems for coal mines, oil and gas facilities, and landfill and animal waste sites, which together are estimated to produce 43 per cent of manmade methane emissions.

The group argues that methane-capture systems represent a particularly cost effective means of tackling climate change because many of the technologies required are already proven on both a technical and commercial level. It also claims that cutting methane emissions represents one of the most effective means of addressing global warming as the gas is 23 times more effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide.

It also has a relatively short lifetime in the atmosphere of about 12 years, meaning that any reductions in methane emissions achieved now should have a relatively quick impact on the climate.

Energy commissioner Andris Piebalgs said that the Commissions' involvement in the group "will directly contribute to the [our] goal of limiting global warming to two degrees Celsius".

The Commission will now join the group's steering committee, as well as its technical sub-committees on methane from oil and gas operations and from coal mines.

The news comes in the same week as US energy giant Pacific Gas & Electric began generating energy for 50,000 homes from a methane-fired power plant in California fuelled by the manure collected from 5,000 cows.