In 2024, two new satellites have 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 12 months as a public-private partnership.
Methane is a super-powered greenhouse gasoline. Pound-for-pound, methane is 80 times stronger than carbon dioxide within the first twenty years after launch. Over the previous two centuries, its focus has more than doubled, a a lot sooner enhance than for carbon dioxide. Methane concentrations are rising extra shortly than at any time since record-keeping started.
World methane emissions are additionally dominated by human actions to an extent far higher than for carbon dioxide. Greater than 60 percent 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 liable for a lot of that air pollution. Emissions of methane are dominated by so-called super-emitters: 5 percent of facilities yield greater than half of all methane emissions in a given oil and gasoline 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 under them—like a basketball spinning in your finger—they see a unique band of potential emitting websites in every go.
MethaneSAT has a wider discipline of view than Carbon Mapper. The pixels it photos are 15,000 sq. miles, concerning the measurement of Montana’s Glacier Nationwide Park. It is going to be good at figuring out methane sizzling spots. Carbon Mapper, in distinction, is just like the zoom in your digicam. It is going to distinguish particular person sources on the scale of a soccer discipline, attributing methane plumes to single sources (and single homeowners) on the bottom.
There’s a caveat: Each of those satellites want daylight to see the world. This would possibly effectively lead unscrupulous homeowners of oil and gasoline 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 homeowners of most oil and gasoline 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 big gasoline leaks just like the 2015 blowout on the Aliso Canyon pure gasoline 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 largest gasoline leak in US historical past.
In 2025, these satellites will allow us to discover the world’s largest polluters. We’ll have the ability to peer into coal mines and oil and gasoline fields in distant corners of the world and nations the place we aren’t allowed to work in immediately, 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. Massive oil corporations resembling ExxonMobil and Chevron and their subsidiaries might be flagged for air pollution within the Permian Basin in West Texas and the Bakken Oil Subject in North Dakota. Landfill, feedlot, and wastewater remedy operators may also be embarrassed. In 2025, there might be nowhere for the “Most Needed” methane polluters to cover.
