In Brief:
Methane emissions have risen faster than ever in the past five years, Stanford scientists announced last week.
It's a troubling finding: over the first 20 years after it's released, methane warms the atmosphere 90 times faster than CO2. That danger has prompted 150 countries to commit to cutting methane emissions by 30 percent by 2030 — a goal that's "as distant as a desert oasis," according to an author of the study behind last week's warning.
The August launch of a methane-sensing satellite marked the beginning of an era of new opportunities for state and local governments to bend this curve. The satellite carries an imaging spectrometer, a device that measures wavelengths of light reflected from the ground.
Methane absorbs wavelengths that give it a unique “fingerprint,” and this fingerprint in reflected light can be associated with a precise location on the Earth’s surface. With this information, those responsible for emitters such as oil and gas facilities can go directly to the source and take necessary steps, whether stopping a gas pipeline leak or repairing a methane capture system in a landfill.
The launch was a long-awaited step forward for Carbon Mapper, a public-private partnership that includes the California Air Resources Board (CARB), the University of Arizona, Arizona State University, Planet Labs PBC and RMI. It has been preparing for this moment for almost a decade, validating its technology and approach by deploying spectrometers in high-altitude aircraft.
Targeted flights over oil and gas infrastructure and landfills have identified methane plumes that were fixed within days of observation in some cases. Tanager-1, which takes its name from a species of colorful songbirds, is the first satellite in a planned constellation that could eventually scan the entire surface of the planet and detect high emission sources on a near-daily basis.
“We’re excited that the satellite’s launched,” says Dan Cusworth, project scientist for Carbon Mapper. “Now it’s executing the plan, showing how the satellite can be put to good use.”
Sharing Satellite Data
The plan is to make Tanager-1's (and future satellites') data available to government officials, and the public, through an open access data portal. This one satellite can’t cover the whole planet, so Carbon Mapper will start with reports from high-interest areas such as Permian Basin oil and gas facilities.
Initial tests of the satellite instrument have already begun, Cusworth says, including the ability to communicate with it and upload software. Imaging from Tanager-1 will be compared with validated imaging from aircraft to see if anything needs adjusting. This will continue through the fall, with data release beginning in 2025.
The data portal is already live, drawing on past collection from sensors on Carbon Mapper aircraft and more current NASA satellite scans. Cusworth notes that the NASA instrument was not designed for methane detection and is not as sensitive as Tanager-1. These instruments can also detect CO2 plumes, and time-stamped observations of them are also available to users, searchable by location. Cusworth expects to get new data from Tanager-1 every 90 days or so. It will take another 30 days to translate this raw information into something that can be presented on the portal.
The more satellites join the constellation, the faster the pace of updates and the greater the area they will encompass. In addition to what appears on the portal, data seekers can already pay Planet Labs to task the satellite to gather images from a specific area and receive data within a matter of days. This could be a researcher, industry or a government entity with funding to reduce methane emissions, eager to have a better picture of where problems exist.
Taking Responsibility
Local governments have jurisdiction over the third-largest source of methane emissions: the decomposition of organic waste in municipal solid waste landfills. Mike Kovalchick, senior environmental engineer at the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy, understands how important it could be to have more satellite data.
Carbon Mapper planes that flew over landfills in Southeast Michigan in 2021 detected substantial plumes, and he was alerted to this data by a colleague. He visited several landfills where the leaks were spotted, determined the causes and ensured necessary repairs were made.
He’s since used data from a NASA satellite to try to track emissions. Aerial sensing is a big upgrade over past methods, Kovalchick says, which involve walking the surface of a landfill with a detection device. The success of this depends in part on whether the walker’s path coincides with a leak.
Conditions in landfills change rapidly, says Kovalchick, and more emission data, at shorter intervals, will be a big step forward for those who manage them. “My long-term hope is that landfills will take responsibility,” he says. “They’ll see the public data that comes out and they’ll notice that their landfill is the one that’s leaking.”
Underestimated Risks
A study led by Carbon Mapper scientists, published this year, suggests that the scale of methane leaks from landfills may be underestimated. Aerial surveys over 200 active U.S. landfills found emissions from more than half of them. This is as much as 50 times the rate at which such leaks have been detected at oil and gas infrastructure in Texas and California. Moreover, landfill emissions persisted for weeks or months.
In May, the nonprofit Industrious Labs published a report based on a review of inspections at 22 landfills by the Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance. Surface monitoring at these landfills found 711 instances of emissions that exceeded EPA’s regulatory limit, though nearly half of the sites had reported they had no emissions above it.
This situation was compared to a fire department not tracking smoke pouring out of buildings in a Senate hearing on methane emissions, says Katherine Bluavelt, circular economy director for Industrious Labs. The difference is that methane is invisible.
Regular flights over the U.S. by Carbon Mapper satellites could create an opportunity to see where this invisible smoke is coming from. Eventually, every region of the world could be covered.
“Methane is the most effective emergency brake you have on global warming,” Bluavelt says. “We’ve got to point the fire department in the right direction.”
