Introduction/objective:

greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions of natural origin have increased due to anthropogenic actions and threaten the planet with environmental imbalance. Reservoirs for storing water, which is later used to drive the turbines of hydroelectric power plants, accumulate sediments, generating GHG. This paper analyzes the methods used to estimate GHG emissions in reservoirs, classifying scientific publications found in the ScienceDirect and Google Scholar search engines.

Methodology:

the analytical method uses a Boolean expression to collect information in the indicated search engines and extract the relevant literature considering factors such as water temperature, geographic location, reservoir type and surface area, gas type and technology, which attributes a relevance value to each characteristic to elaborate a matrix of results.

Results:

the results show that more than 50 % are based on GHG estimates and the rest on direct measurements in the reservoirs. In addition, the contribution of artificial intelligence as an estimation technique is less than 6 %.

Conclusions:

finally, the world regions where studies are conducted are proportionally distributed and the analysis of scientific literature indicates versatility in GHG estimation methods in hydropower reservoirs.