Activists aim to put satellite aloft
Group says it plans to track methane releases from Earth
WASHINGTON — The Environmental Defense Fund said Wednesday that it planned to launch a satellite into space to track methane emissions from the Earth’s surface, targeting the oil and gas industry as the group seeks to limit emissions that contribute to climate change.
“Technology has advanced to the point where you no longer need to wait for government to deploy these kinds of tools,” said Mark Brownstein, senior vice president of energy at the environmental group. “We believe that reducing oil and gas methane emissions is an urgent task.”
Methane, the main component of natural gas, is a powerful greenhouse gas that is released from drilling operations and pipeline leaks.
The Environmental Defense Fund’s initiative shows that getting a satellite into orbit isn’t as tough as it used to be. Estimates put the number of active satellites above the planet at more than 1,000, allowing everything from GPS technology on cellular phones to weather forecasting to the transmission of television signals.
NASA says it maintains two satellites tracking methane emissions in the Earth’s atmosphere. And last year, the European Space Agency launched the Sentinel-5p satellite to monitor methane, ozone and other pollutants.
But the rate at which methane escapes from wellheads and pipelines and even city utilities’ underground pipes has been a point of contention for some time. While oil companies argue a relatively minimal amount of natural gas escapes into the atmosphere, groups such as the Environmental Defense Fund have contended neither the industry nor government has fully assessed the problem.
“There’s been a lot of infight-
ing in the science community,” said Amy Myers Jaffe, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a Washington think tank. “But it’s critical if you care about climate change. Methane is much more potent than carbon dioxide.”
The Environmental Defense Fund believes its satellite, which it has named MethaneSAT, will help clear up some of that debate. It would be capable of tracking methane emissions from 80 percent of the world’s oil and gas facilities on a weekly basis. And it already has some high-profile endorsements from world policy experts.
“An effective response to the problem of methane emissions requires good data,” Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency, said in a statement released by EDF. “Today’s announcement is a major step forward.”
EDF is in talks with technology companies to build its satellite. The advocacy group has hired Tom Ingersoll, the former head of Skybox Imaging, the satellite company Google bought for $500 million in 2014, to manage the project. But nothing is final. The nonprofit is still fundraising for the satellite, which it hopes to launch in 2021. Brownstein declined to give an estimate on the cost but said it would “be substantially less than the multihundred-million-dollar projects that are typical of government space agencies.”
The satellite was announced in Vancouver, British Columbia, by EDF President Fred Krupp at a TED Talk event, in which figures from a variety of fields are invited to speak under the slogan, “ideas worth spreading.”
EDF’s satellite launch is one of a collection of projects vying for more than $400 million in funding through the TED organization.
The announcement by EDF comes as the oil and gas industry begins to take methane leaks and climate change more seriously. Last year, the American Petroleum Institute announced a voluntary program through which companies could employ advanced leak detection technology and replace older equipment prone to methane leaks.
Reducing emissions from the production and transportation of natural gas will be critical if companies are to convince policymakers worldwide that natural gas, which burns cleaner that coal, oil and other fossil fuels, is a viable source of energy as countries work to stop the planet from warming more than 2 degrees Celsius, Jaffe said.
“Most of the companies are moving in that direction,” she said.