In 2024, two new satellites were launched to detect methane super-emitters from the atmosphere: the Environmental Defense Fund’s MethaneSAT launched in March 2024; and Carbon Mapper, launched late last year as a public-private partnership.
Methane is a very powerful greenhouse gas. Pound for pound, methane is 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide in the first two decades after release. Over the past two centuries, its concentration has more than doubled, an increase much faster than carbon dioxide. Methane levels 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 carbon dioxide. More than 60 percent of global methane emissions come from human activities: extracting fossil fuels; raising cows that bellow (not fart); to dispose of waste in our landfills and waste treatment facilities.
The good news is that only a small percentage of sites are responsible for that pollution. Methane emissions are dominated by so-called super-emitters: the 5 percent of facilities that produce more than half of all methane emissions from a particular oil and gas field or industry. We cut those emissions and we’re going to stop global methane pollution a lot.
MethaneSAT and Carbon Mapper orbit the Earth north-south in the polar circle. As the planet spins beneath them—like a basketball spinning on your finger—they see a distinct band of potential emission sites on each pass.
MethaneSAT has a wider field of view than Carbon Mapper. The pixels it captures are 15,000 square kilometers, roughly the size of Montana’s Glacier National Park. It will be good to identify hot spots of methane. Carbon Mapper, by contrast, is like zooming in on your camera. It will isolate individual wells on the scale of a football field, exposing methane pipes from single wells (and individual owners) to the ground.
There is a caveat: Both of these satellites need sunlight to see Earth. This may lead to unscrupulous owners of oil and gas companies telling their workers to prepare the site at night, when such satellites cannot see them. Now I don’t believe that the owners of many oil and gas companies are unscrupulous, but some of them are and, in 2025, they will dump us in the night.
Regardless, long gone are the days when major gas leaks like the 2015 natural gas explosion in Aliso Canyon in Los Angeles would go unreported for weeks. That explosion sickened nearby residents, led to a $1.8 billion payout from SoCalGas to nearly 10,000 displaced families, and eventually released 97,000 tons of methane, the largest gas leak in US history.
By 2025, these satellites will allow us to detect the world’s biggest polluters. We will be able to peer into coal mines and oil and gas fields in remote corners of the world and in countries where we are not allowed to operate today, such as the Raspadskaya Coal Mine in Russia and the Qingshui Valley in China.
We will find super-emitters in the United States again, and some Fortune 500 executives will have egg on their faces. Major oil companies such as ExxonMobil and Chevron and their subsidiaries will be targeted for pollution in the Permian Basin in West Texas and the Bakken Oil Field in North Dakota. Landfill, feedlot, and wastewater treatment workers will be disappointed. By 2025, there will be nowhere for the “Most Wanted” methane polluters to hide.
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