Clean Energy 101: Methane-Detecting Satellites

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Satellites are increasingly important tool in by spotting global emissions. There are already dozens of greenhouse gas-detecting satellit

, for example, can map methane, nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, and various aerosols as it passes daily over Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas — a significant geographic reach. Its resolution can narrow down to a couple square miles of Earth. Compare that with the GHGSat-C1 satellite, which is designed to provide high-resolution monitoring of industrial facilities down to the point-source level at 25-meter scale.

Each of these has its use case: A satellite like TROPOMI can be effectively used to “true up” a regional or national reported GHG inventory, while a satellite like GHGSat can be used to alert an oil and gas operator to a leak at one of its facilities so that it can be fixed immediately.While regional-, sector-, and asset-level data enabled by satellite observations are all important, the time-bound urgency of the climate crisis led RMI to focus on the need to pinpoint methane super-emitters.

Such sources have historically proven difficult to track, yet they represent our biggest near-term opportunity to mitigate methane given their disproportionate impact and the fact that many — once identified — can be addressed quickly and cost-effectively. And new satellites with distinct capabilities are changing the game.

Completeness combines three satellite parameters in one metric to quantify the share of global methane point source emissions that can be detected:, or the emissions threshold that can be detected by the satellite instrument Sampling frequencyCurrent satellite discussions tend to focus solely on detection limits and pay little attention to the other system attributes — or treat these attributes as independent of one another.

To understand how different technologies stack up according to the metric of completeness, we encourage you to visitMethane point sources are incredibly complex, to say nothing of greenhouse gas emissions more broadly. While the completeness metric is valuable for this use case, we hope to build upon this work by addressing additional use cases and broadening awareness of how various technologies can be used to improve global climate intelligence.

 

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