In 2024, two new satellites were launched to search for supermethane sources from space: Environmental Defense Fund MethaneSAT takeoff in March 2024; And Carbon mapperlaunched late last year as a public-private partnership.
Methane is a super-energetic greenhouse gas. In pounds, methane is 80 times stronger than carbon dioxide during the first two decades after release. Over the past two centuries, its focus has been more than doublelevels increase much faster than carbon dioxide. Methane concentrations are rising faster than ever since records began.
Global methane emissions are also driven by human activities to a much greater extent than carbon dioxide. Than 60 percent Global methane emissions come from human activities: fossil fuel extraction; burping cows (not farting); dump trash into our landfills and waste disposal sites.
The good news is that a small fraction of locations are responsible for most of that pollution. Methane emissions are dominated by so-called super emissions: 5% of facilities generates more than half of all methane emissions in a given oil and gas sector or industry. Reduce those emissions and we will dramatically reduce global methane pollution.
MethaneSAT and Carbon Mapper orbit the Earth in a north-south direction in a polar orbit. As the planet rotated below them—like a basketball spinning on your finger—they saw a different range of potential emission locations in each pass.
MethaneSAT has a wider field of view than Carbon Mapper. The pixels it photographs cover an area of 15,000 square miles, about the size of Glacier National Park in Montana. It would be good at identifying methane hot spots. In contrast, Carbon Mapper is like the zoom on your camera. It will differentiate individual sources at the scale of a football field, attributing methane plumes to single sources (and single owners) above ground.
There's a catch: Both of these satellites require sunlight to see the world. This could lead unscrupulous owners of oil and gas companies to order their crews to perform facility maintenance at night, when those satellites cannot see them. Now I don't believe that the owners of most oil and gas companies are immoral, but some of them are and by 2025 they will become night owls with us.
Regardless, gone are the days when major gas leaks like the 2015 explosion at the Aliso Canyon natural gas storage field in Los Angeles would go unreported for weeks. That discharge sickened nearby residents, led to a $1.8 billion settlement from SoCalGas to nearly 10,000 displaced families, and ultimately released 97,000 tons of methanethe largest gas leak in US history.
By 2025, these satellites will allow us to find the world's biggest polluters. We will be able to observe coal mines and oil and gas fields in remote parts 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 will also find super emitters in the United States, and some Fortune 500 executives will be angry. Major oil companies like ExxonMobil and Chevron and their subsidiaries will be flagged for pollution in the Permian Basin in West Texas and the Bakken Oil Field in North Dakota. Landfill, livestock and wastewater treatment operators will also be confused. By 2025, there will be nowhere for “most wanted” methane polluters to hide.