CLIMATEWIRE | A new satellite mission, spearheaded by the Environmental Defense Fund, aims to help scientists spy on global methane emissions from the oil and gas industry. And it could help policymakers crack down on major sources of the potent greenhouse gas.
Weather permitting, MethaneSat is scheduled to launch Monday afternoon from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California after six years of planning and building. The project involves a number of partners, including the New Zealand Space Agency, Harvard University, British aerospace company BAE Systems and others.
Google has joined the crew, too, providing cloud computing services to process the data that MethaneSat collects as it circles the globe. Google also will use AI algorithms, informed by satellite imagery, to construct maps of oil and gas infrastructure around the world. These maps will help researchers pinpoint the exact facilities where methane plumes originate.
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The new mission could provide important insights as global temperatures rise. Methane has a shorter lifetime in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, but it’s a far more potent greenhouse gas. Studies estimate that methane emissions may account for as much as 30 percent of the planet’s warming.
Methane emissions come from a variety of sources, including landfills, wetlands, agriculture, thawing permafrost and industrial activities — particularly oil and gas production, which produces methane as a byproduct.
MethaneSat will loosely monitor a number of these sources in different parts of the world. But it will focus most closely on oil and gas activities — partly because they account for such a large share of global emissions and partly because these emissions can be relatively easily addressed once they’re spotted, said Steven Hamburg, EDF’s chief scientist and MethaneSat’s project lead.
“Some call it the low-hanging fruit — I like to call it fruit lying on the ground,” he said at a press briefing Friday. “We can really reduce those emissions, and we can do it rapidly and see the benefits.”
The International Energy Agency estimates the energy sector is responsible for about 40 percent of the world’s human-produced methane emissions, and oil and gas operations combined emit about 80 million metric tons of methane each year.
The IEA has found that national governments dramatically underreport their own energy-related methane emissions, highlighting the need for better monitoring systems and stronger emissions reduction policies.
There are a variety of well-known strategies for reducing methane emissions from oil and gas operations, including installing methane detection sensors, repairing leaks in methane-producing infrastructure, ensuring that wells are properly plugged and adopting new technologies that reduce the need to vent or flare methane during the production process.
“Oil and gas methane emissions represent one of the best near-term opportunities for climate action because the pathways for reducing them are well-known and cost-effective,” the IEA noted in its 2023 Global Methane Tracker report.
Governments around the world are beginning to clamp down on energy-related methane emissions.
The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act — President Joe Biden’s signature climate law — included a pollution tax on methane emissions from the oil and gas sector. EPA also announced in December new federal standards for methane emissions from oil and gas operations, requiring the industry to upgrade certain types of equipment and to monitor and repair leaks when they occur. The rule is scheduled for formal publication this month, after a three-month delay.
The European Union agreed in November on a deal that requires the operators of fossil fuel infrastructure to monitor and report their methane emissions, address leaks and to phase out most flaring and venting practices by 2027. It also requires companies importing oil and gas into the EU to meet certain methane monitoring, reporting and intensity standards.
It’s possible that MethaneSat observations could be used to independently verify industry emissions reports and enforce these kinds of standards, Hamburg suggested.
MethaneSat isn’t the only satellite tracking global methane emissions. Some of the European Space Agency’s Sentinel satellite missions, as well as NASA’s EMIT mission, are able to spot large methane plumes from so-called superemitters.
But these missions have lower precision than MethaneSat, and they can’t provide as much granular information about the distribution of methane emissions from oil and gas producing regions, said Steven Wofsy, an atmospheric scientist at Harvard University and MethaneSat’s science lead.
GHGSat, a private technology company, operates a constellation of satellites with methane monitoring capabilities. The satellites are able to detect emissions from small sources, including individual oil and gas wells. But they’re more focused on pinpoint sources, while MethaneSat is able to provide more information about the emissions across an entire oil or gas basin, Wofsy said. GHGSat’s data is also proprietary, whereas MethaneSat’s observations will be freely available to the public.
These different satellite missions complement one another, Wofsy added. Some provide larger, global perspectives on methane emissions, while others help identify pinprick emissions sources in specific places. MethaneSat falls in the middle of this range of capabilities, providing “information that nobody else has,” he said.
“We’re not the only satellite to measure methane — we’re just measuring it differently,” Wofsy added. “We’re measuring it better for some purposes, and the others have their things they can do that we can't do.”