In 2024, two new satellites had been launched to seek out methane super-emitters from house: the Environmental Protection Fund’s MethaneSAT took off in March 2024; and Carbon Mapper, launched later final yr as a public-private partnership.
Methane is a super-powered greenhouse fuel. Pound-for-pound, methane is 80 instances stronger than carbon dioxide within the first twenty years after launch. Over the previous two centuries, its focus has greater than doubled, a a lot sooner improve than for carbon dioxide. Methane concentrations are rising extra shortly than at any time since record-keeping started.
International methane emissions are additionally dominated by human actions to an extent far larger than for carbon dioxide. Greater than 60 % of worldwide methane emissions come from human exercise: extracting fossil fuels; elevating cows that burp (not fart); dumping trash in our landfills and waste remedy websites.
The excellent news is {that a} tiny fraction of websites are accountable for a lot of that air pollution. Emissions of methane are dominated by so-called super-emitters: 5 % of amenities yield greater than half of all methane emissions in a given oil and fuel discipline or trade. Quench these emissions and we’ll dent world methane air pollution considerably.
MethaneSAT and Carbon Mapper circle the Earth north-south in a polar orbit. Because the planet turns beneath them—like a basketball spinning in your finger—they see a distinct band of potential emitting websites in every move.
MethaneSAT has a wider discipline of view than Carbon Mapper. The pixels it photos are 15,000 sq. miles, concerning the dimension of Montana’s Glacier Nationwide Park. Will probably be good at figuring out methane sizzling spots. Carbon Mapper, in distinction, is just like the zoom in your digicam. It would distinguish particular person sources on the scale of a soccer discipline, attributing methane plumes to single sources (and single house owners) on the bottom.
There’s a caveat: Each of those satellites want daylight to see the world. This would possibly properly lead unscrupulous house owners of oil and fuel corporations to order their crews to carry out facility upkeep at evening, when such satellites can’t see them. Now I don’t consider that the house owners of most oil and fuel corporations are unscrupulous, however a few of them are and, in 2025, they’ll go night-owl on us.
Regardless, gone are the times when enormous fuel leaks just like the 2015 blowout on the Aliso Canyon pure fuel storage discipline in Los Angeles will go unreported for weeks. That blowout sickened close by residents, led to a $1.8 billion settlement from SoCalGas to nearly 10,000 evacuated households, and in the end emitted 97,000 metric ton of methane, the most important fuel leak in US historical past.
In 2025, these satellites will allow us to discover the world’s largest polluters. We’ll be capable of peer into coal mines and oil and fuel fields in distant corners of the world and international locations the place we aren’t allowed to work in as we speak, just like the Raspadskaya Coal Mine in Russia and the Qingshui basin in China.
We’ll discover super-emitters in the US too, and a few Fortune 500 executives may have egg on their faces. Huge oil corporations equivalent to ExxonMobil and Chevron and their subsidiaries shall be flagged for air pollution within the Permian Basin in West Texas and the Bakken Oil Area in North Dakota. Landfill, feedlot, and wastewater remedy operators may even be embarrassed. In 2025, there shall be nowhere for the “Most Wished” methane polluters to cover.