A washing-machine-sized satellite is to “name and shame” the worst methane polluters in the oil and gas industry.
MethaneSat is scheduled to launch from California onboard a SpaceX rocket on Monday at 2pm local time (22:00 GMT). It will provide the first near-comprehensive global view of leaks of the potent greenhouse gas from the oil and gas sector, and all of 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 heating driving the climate crisis. Leaks from the fossil fuel industry are a major source of human-caused emissions and stemming these is the fastest single way to curb temperature rises.
MethaneSat was developed by the Environmental Defense Fund, a US NGO, in partnership with the New Zealand Space Agency and cost $88m to build and launch. Earlier EDF measurements from planes show 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 cut their emissions of the gas by 30% from 2020 levels by 2030. Some oil and gas companies have made similar pledges, and new regulations to limit methane leaks are being worked on in the US, EU, Japan and South Korea.
The EDF’s senior vice-president, Mark Brownstein, said: “MethaneSat is a tool for accountability . I’m sure many people think this could be used to name and shame companies who are poor emissions performers, and that’s true. But [it] can [also] help document progress that leading companies are making in reducing their emissions.”
Beautiful.
Let me just get ahead of this: Yes sending up satellites via SpaceX rockets (fueled by kerosene or, in the next generation, methane) has a significant carbon footprint. The trade-off to consider is how effective its use is at targeting the most harmful sources of methane emitted daily on Earth.
Each current SpaceX launch is equivalent to the annual emissions of 73 automobiles. There are 1.5 billion automobiles and light trucks in the world. SpaceX makes ~20 flights a year. That works out to about 10 to the minus 7th power of the global auto sector, which does not include heavy trucks as far as I can tell.
I would hesitate to call 10 to the minus 7 power “significant”.
Supposedly, the Starship will be using biofuel methane, so likely less true emissions than the regular SpaceX rockets.
We already have satellite data on methane sources around the world. It’s pretty interesting to look at a rendering of the data on a global map – the highest concentrations are not necessarily where we might expect them to be. Mostly its coming from southeast Asia:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/96198796@N05/53568576950/in/album-72157705569308771/
Methane Sat was part-funded by the New Zealand Space Agency under the aegis of the previous, left-leaning government here. Methane emissions from agriculture are supposed to make up nearly half the country’s global warming footprint, and there was a very contentious ‘all gases’ plan to account for this, and charge the industry accordingly. The present government, elected with a lot of backlash support from farmers, seems to be going all out to undo everything the ancien regime did over the preceding six years, but the satellite’s already a done deal, so the information will be out there. The silver lining on that cloud is that the present coalition has vowed to make genetic techniques in agriculture available – they’d effectively been banned for years, and the Greens’ influence in the outgoing coalition ensured that would continue. Agresearch, the Crown Research Agency, had developed a variety of white clover which greatly reduced methane emissions from the rumens of cows and sheep grazing on it nearly twenty years ago, but no outdoor tests were permitted – any further research had to be done overseas. (The modification was one gene for tannins, as in tea, which was present in the white clover, but inactive – the version in other strains had it, but those were less well adapted for farming.) Similar work on ryegrass, on animals naturally making less CH4, and on gut bacteria supressing methanogenesis, was likewise greatly restricted. Farmers were rightly irate that ways of improving their performance were being stymied for reasons with no scientific basis. Especially so, since feed turned into methane is wasted – animals should be converting that into more milk, meat, and wool. The animal’s are healthier too, if they’re not constantly bloated with gas.
Hopefully, more work will also be done on genetic methods of controlling introduced pests. For example, the Australian brush-tailed possum, brought here a century back to develop a fur trade, has expanded unhindered, with no natural predators. They’re estimated to eat over 20,000 tons of vegetation every night, with major effects on native forests, wildlife, and reforestation efforts.