New satellite will sniff out methane emissions
The global crackdown on methane emissions will get a boost from a watchdog satellite built to track and publicly reveal the biggest methane polluters in the oil and gas industry.
The satellite, designed by scientists from the non-profit Environmental Defence Fund (EDF) and Harvard University, and launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California yesterday, will monitor areas that supply 80% of the world’s natural gas. Unlike other methane tracking satellites, it will cover a vast territory while also gathering data detailed enough to spot the sources of emissions.
Methane, a potent greenhouse gas released from farms, landfills and leaky fossil fuel equipment, accounts for nearly a third of global warming. Cutting methane emissions is one of the fastest ways to slow climate change, according to climate scientists, because even though it traps 80 times as much heat in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, it dissipates after about 12 years.
Most of the world’s oil and gas companies agreed to slash their methane emissions by more than 80% by 2030 at last year’s COP28 climate conference, and policymakers are working to hold them to that promise.
But so far, it’s been hard to track companies’ progress. Companies and regulators can measure some emissions by installing methane detectors or using planes or drones to fly sensors over a facility, but the data is incomplete and hard to compare between companies.
Now a new generation of satellites, led by Methanesat, promises to give a more complete picture of the oil and gas industry’s global methane emissions.
“We’re on the verge of a methane data revolution ... in which satellites are having a very prominent role,” said Manfredi Caltagirone, who heads the United Nations’ International Methane Emissions Observatory. “Methanesat is exciting in particular ... because it’s expected to give us so much better data than what we have now.”
There are already a handful of public and private satellites that monitor methane emissions, but they either zoom in on small areas or take fuzzy, low-resolution surveys of the world. Currently, no satellite has a good enough view of global emissions to make meaningful comparisons between the methane coming from different oil and gas operations.
Methanesat is the first of several satellites that aims to make more detailed methane emissions data public. Another satellite, designed by Nasa and a greenhouse gas tracking non-profit called Carbon Mapper, is set to launch this year. Japan will send another emissions-tracking satellite into space this year, and the European Space Agency plans to launch two more in 2026.