In 2024, two new satellites will be launched to detect methane super-emitters from space: the Environmental Defense Fund’s MethaneSAT will be launched in March 2024; and Carbon Mapper, launched late last year as a public-private partnership. Methane is a super-powerful greenhouse gas. Pound-for-pound, methane is 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide in the first two decades after its release. Over the past two centuries, its concentration has doubled, rising faster than carbon dioxide. Methane concentrations are rising faster than at any time since records began. Global methane emissions are also dominated by human activity to a greater extent than carbon dioxide. More than 60 percent of global methane emissions come from human activities: extracting fossil fuels; taking care of burping cows (not farting); dump waste in our landfills and waste treatment sites. The good news is that a small fraction of the site is responsible for most of that pollution. Methane emissions are dominated by so-called super-emitters: 5 percent of facilities produce more than half of all methane emissions in the oil and gas field or industry. Eliminate these emissions and we will significantly eliminate global methane pollution. MethaneSAT and Carbon Mapper orbit the Earth north-south in a polar orbit. When the planet is below him-like a basketball spinning on his fingers-they see a different band of potential emitting sites in each pass.MethaneSAT has a wider field of view than the Carbon Mapper. The pixels drawn are 15,000 square miles, roughly the size of Montana’s Glacier National Park. It would be good to identify methane hot spots. Carbon Mapper, in contrast, is like zooming in on your camera. It will distinguish individual sources on the size of a football field, attributing methane plumes to one source (and one owner) on the ground. There is a caveat: these two satellites need sunlight to see the world. This may lead unscrupulous oil and gas company owners to order crews to perform facility maintenance at night, when the satellites cannot see. Now I don’t believe that oil and gas company owners are generally unscrupulous, but some are and, in 2025, they will attack us. The 2015 explosion at the Aliso Canyon natural gas storage field in Los Angeles would go unreported for weeks. The explosion sickened nearby residents, led to a $1.8 billion settlement from SoCalGas to nearly 10,000 evacuated families, and eventually released 97,000 metric tons of methane, the largest gas leak in US history. By 2025, these satellites will allow us to discover the world’s biggest polluters. . We will be able to see coal mines and oil and gas fields in the corners of the world and countries where work is not allowed today, such as the Raspadskaya Coal Mine in Russia and the Qingshui Basin in China. It will find super-emitters in the United States as well, and some Fortune 500 executives will have egg on their faces. Big oil companies such as 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, feedlot, and sewage operators will also be embarrassed. By 2025, there will be nowhere for the “Most Wanted” methane pollutant to hide.
