Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
In 2024, two new satellites were launched to find super-emitters of methane from space: the Environmental Defense Fund. MethaneSAT takes off in March 2024; and Carbon Mapperlaunched later last year as a public-private partnership.
Methane is a super-powered greenhouse gas. Pound for pound, methane is 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide in the first two decades after release. In the last two centuries, its concentration has more than doubleda much faster increase than for carbon dioxide. Methane concentrations are increasing faster than at any time since record keeping began.
Global methane emissions are also dominated by human activity to a much greater extent than for carbon dioxide. More than 60 percent of global methane emissions come from human activity: extraction of fossil fuels; raising rutting cows (not rag); dispose of trash in our landfills and waste treatment sites.
The good news is that a small fraction of sites are responsible for much of that pollution. Methane emissions are dominated by the so-called super-emitters: 5 percent of the facilities accounts for more than half of all methane emissions in an oil and gas field or industry. Turn off these emissions and we will substantially reduce global methane pollution.
MethaneSAT and Carbon Mapper circle the Earth north-south in a polar orbit. As the planet spins beneath them — like a basketball spinning on your finger — they see a different band of potential emission sites at every turn.
MethaneSAT has a wider field of view than Carbon Mapper. The pixels that image are 15,000 square miles, about the size of Montana’s Glacier National Park. It will be good to identify hot spots of methane. Carbon Mapper, in contrast, is like the zoom in your camera. It will distinguish individual sources at the scale of a football field, attributing methane plumes to unique (and single-owner) sources on the ground.
There is a caveat: both satellites need the sun to see the world. This could lead unscrupulous owners of oil and gas companies to order their crews to perform maintenance on facilities at night, when such satellites cannot see them. Now I do not believe that the owners of most oil and gas companies are not scrupulous, but some of them are and, in 2025, they will go for us.
Regardless, gone are the days when huge gas leaks like the 2015 explosion at the Aliso Canyon natural gas storage field in Los Angeles would go unreported for weeks. That explosion sickened nearby residents, led to a $1.8 billion settlement from SoCalGas to evacuate nearly 10,000 families, and ultimately evicted them. 97,000 metric tons of methanethe largest gas leak in US history.
In 2025, these satellites will allow us to find the biggest polluters in the world. We will be able to look into coal mines and oil and gas fields in remote corners 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-emitters in the US too, and some Fortune 500 executives have egg on their faces. Major oil companies such as ExxonMobil and Chevron and their subsidiaries will be reported for pollution in the Permian Basin in West Texas and the Bakken Oil Field in North Dakota. Landfill, feedlot and waste water treatment operators will also be embarrassed. In 2025, there will be nowhere for the “Most Wanted” methane polluters to hide.
