Satellites Can Now Identify Methane ‘Super-Emitters’

Two new satellites launched in 2024 to search for methane superemitters from space: Environmental Defense Fund MethaneSAT took off in March 2024; And Carbon mapperlaunched late last year as a public-private partnership.

Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas. Per pound of methane 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide in the first two decades after release. Its concentration has increased over the past two centuries. more than doubledwhich is much faster than for carbon dioxide. Methane concentrations are rising faster than at any time since records began.

Global methane emissions are also dominated by human activity, much more so than carbon dioxide emissions. More than 60 percent global methane emissions come from human activities: fossil fuel extraction; raising cows that burp (don’t fart); We throw garbage into our landfills and waste recycling sites.

The good news is that a small number of sites are responsible for most of this pollution. Methane emissions are dominated by so-called superemitters: 5 percent of objects produce more than half of all methane emissions in a given oil and gas field or industry. Suppress these emissions and we will significantly reduce global methane pollution.

MethanSAT and Carbon Mapper orbit the Earth from north to south in a polar orbit. As the planet spins beneath them—like a basketball spinning on your finger—they see different swathes of potential emitting sites with each pass.

MethanSAT has a wider field of view than Carbon Mapper. The pixels it displays cover an area of ​​15,000 square miles, which is the size of Glacier National Park in Montana. This will help identify methane hot spots. Carbon Mapper, on the other hand, is like a zoom on your camera. It will differentiate between individual sources on the scale of a football field, attributing methane plumes to individual sources (and individual owners) on the ground.

There’s a caveat: both of these satellites need sunlight to see the world. This may well lead to unscrupulous oil and gas company owners ordering their crews to perform maintenance at night when such satellites cannot see them. Now I don’t believe that the owners of most oil and gas companies are unscrupulous, but some of them are unscrupulous and in 2025 they will be upon us like an owl.

However, gone are the days when huge gas leaks like the 2015 explosion at the Aliso Canyon natural gas field in Los Angeles went unreported for weeks. The explosion disgusted local residents, led to SoCalGas paying $1.8 billion in compensation to nearly 10,000 evacuated families, and ultimately resulted in blowouts 97,000 metric tons of methanelargest gas leak in US history.

In 2025, these satellites will allow us to find the world’s biggest polluters. We will be able to look into coal mines and oil and gas fields in remote parts of the world and countries where we are not allowed to work today, such as the Raspadskaya coal mine in Russia and the Qingshui Basin in China.

We’ll find super issuers in the United States too, and some Fortune 500 CEOs will have egg on their faces. Major oil companies such as ExxonMobil and Chevron and their subsidiaries will be labeled as polluters in the Permian Basin in West Texas and the Bakken oil field in North Dakota. Operators of landfills, feedlots and wastewater treatment plants will also find themselves in an awkward position. In 2025, the “most wanted” methane polluters will have nowhere to hide.