A satellite the size of a washing machine is to “name and shame” the worst methane polluters in the oil and gas industry.
MethaneSat is scheduled to launch aboard a SpaceX rocket from California at 14:00 local time (22:00 GMT) on Monday. It will provide the first near-comprehensive global view of leaks of the powerful greenhouse gas from the oil and gas sector, and all the data will be made public. It will provide high-resolution data over wider areas than existing satellites.
Methane, also called natural gas, is responsible for 30% of the global warming that is driving the climate crisis. Leaks from the fossil fuel industry are a major source of human-caused emissions and preventing them is the fastest single way to combat temperature rises.
MethaneSat was developed by the Environmental Defense Fund, an American NGO, in partnership with the New Zealand Space Agency and cost $88 million to build and launch. Earlier EDF measurements from aircraft show that methane emissions were 60% higher than calculated estimates published by US authorities and elsewhere.
More than 150 countries have signed a global methane pledge to reduce their emissions of the gas by 30% from 2020 levels by 2030. Some oil and gas companies have made similar promises, and new regulations are being worked on in the US to limit methane leaks. , EU, Japan and South Korea.
EDF Senior Vice President Mark Brownstein said: “MethaneSat is a tool for accountability . I’m sure many people think it can be used to name and shame companies that are poor emissions performers, and that’s true. But [it] can [also] help document progress that leading companies are making in reducing their emissions.”
The oil and gas industry knows how to stop leaks and the cost of doing so is usually very modest, says Steven Hamburg, EDF’s chief scientist and MethaneSat project leader: “Some call it low-hanging fruit. I like to call it fruit lying on the ground.”
Kelly Levin, the head of science at the Bezos Earth Fund, which helped fund the project, said: “From the air, MethaneSat can see what others can’t, helping good actors and holding bad actors accountable.”
The Guardian revealed more than 1,000 methane “super-emitter” sites in March last year. The worst single leak was spewing out the gas at a rate equivalent to 67m running cars. It also revealed “amazing” methane leaks of Turkmenistan, prompting the government to promise action. These revelations are based on lower-resolution data from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel 5P satellite.
MethaneSat’s instrument has a resolution of about 140 meters, compared to Sentinel 5P’s of about six kilometers (3.7 miles), which allows it to monitor the smaller leaks that together make up a large part of the total. MethaneSat will circle the Earth 15 times a day at an altitude of 590 km and collect data in a 200 km swath. “For the first time, we will have empirical data for effectively the entire oil and gas production system worldwide,” Hamburg said.
The first results after the commissioning process are expected at the beginning of the summer with the full flow of data available from early 2025. Nasa’s Emit mission also collects high-resolution data, but with lower precision methane measurements than MethaneSat, which can detect changes as small as three parts per billion. Methane data from the commercial GHGSat is not freely available.
Experts said they expect MethaneSat the gold standard for methane measurements. It is expected to contribute to the UN international methane emissions observatorywhich will collect and publish data on leaks.
Hamburg said MethaneSat could also be used in the future to detect methane from coal mines, landfills and farming, which are the other main sources of human-caused emissions. The Guardian revealed in February that there were more than 1,000 giant methane leaks from waste dumps since 2019.
