In 2024, two new satellites were launched to find super methane emitters from space: the one from the Environmental Defense Fund MetanoSAT took off in March 2024; and carbon mapperlaunched late last year as a public-private partnership.
Methane is a super powerful greenhouse gas. Pound for pound, methane is 80 times more powerful than carbon dioxide in the first two decades after its release. During the last two centuries, its concentration has more than doublea much faster increase than that of carbon dioxide. Methane concentrations are rising faster than at any time since records began.
Global methane emissions are also dominated by human activities to a much greater extent than those of carbon dioxide. More than 60 percent of global methane emissions come from human activity: fossil fuel extraction; raising cows that burp (don’t fart); littering our landfills and waste treatment sites.
The good news is that a small fraction of the sites are responsible for much of that pollution. Methane emissions are dominated by the so-called super-emitters: 5 percent of facilities They produce more than half of all methane emissions in a given oil and gas field or industry. Let’s turn off those emissions and we will substantially reduce global methane pollution.
MtaneSAT and Carbon Mapper rotate the Earth from north to south in a polar orbit. As the planet spins beneath them, like a basketball spinning on your finger, they see a different band of possible emitting sites on each pass.
MtaneSAT has a wider field of view than Carbon Mapper. The pixels it shows are 15,000 square miles, about the size of Montana’s Glacier National Park. It will be good for identifying methane hot spots. Carbon Mapper, on the other hand, is like the zoom on your camera. It will distinguish individual sources at the scale of a football field, attributing methane plumes to single sources (and single owners) on the ground.
There’s a caveat: Both satellites need sunlight to see the world. This could well lead unscrupulous owners of oil and gas companies to order their teams to perform maintenance on facilities at night, when such satellites cannot see them. Now, I don’t think the owners of most oil and gas companies are unscrupulous, but some of them are, and in 2025, they’re going to go night owls on us.
Still, gone are the days when large gas leaks, like the 2015 explosion at the Aliso Canyon natural gas storage field in Los Angeles, went unreported for weeks. That explosion sickened nearby residents, led to a $1.8 billion settlement by SoCalGas for nearly 10,000 evacuated families, and ultimately issued 97,000 metric tons of methanethe largest gas leak in US history.
In 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 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 will also find super-emitters in the United States, and some Fortune 500 executives will get egg on their faces. Big oil companies like ExxonMobil and Chevron and their subsidiaries will be singled out for pollution in the Permian Basin in West Texas and the Bakken oil field in North Dakota. Landfill, feedlot and wastewater treatment operators will also be embarrassed. By 2025, there will be nowhere for the “most wanted” methane polluters to hide.