Why are there so many methane satellites?

https://heatmap.news/technology/methanesat-edf-satellite-gosat

90 72 2 years ago

codeflo5• 2 years ago

I get that methane has a strong greenhouse effect, and that climate models need to account for its concentration to make accurate predictions. But in terms of climate activism, isn't worrying about methane mostly a red herring?

My understanding is that it only stays in the atmosphere for 12 years or so. It doesn't accumulate over centuries the way CO2 does. This means even if we manage to permanently reduce the amount of methane in the atmosphere, it would only be a one-time effect equivalent to not emitting a certain amount of CO2 once. In the long run, the amount of net carbon added to or removed from the carbon cycle, for example from fossil reservoirs, is the only thing that really matters.

piva00• 2 years ago

It reacts with ozone to decompose into carbon dioxide, so methane not only has a much higher short-lived effect but later turns into CO2.

etrautmann• 2 years ago

That’s exactly why it’s also worth targeting. Its short residence time means that addressing methane emissions could make a meaningful impact. It’s not zero sum - we should address the low hanging fruit of methane emissions while also decarbonizing.

toomuchtodo• 2 years ago

You can also repurpose oil and gas industry people and equipment as part of this work (the Inflation Reduction Act appropriated funds for this). This provides a graceful rolloff for these folks and the industry as oil for energy is sunset.

https://www.doi.gov/pressreleases/through-president-bidens-b...

https://www.energy.gov/fecm/funding-notice-ira-mitigating-em...

https://www.propublica.org/article/the-rising-cost-of-the-oi...

(US centric, but the model transfers)

bilsbie• 2 years ago

Wouldn’t that just embolden folks to emit more co2?

angiosperm3• 2 years ago

There is a project to get transcontinental ships to add emitters of FeCl3 to their exhaust stacks, to catalyze oxidation of methane. It seems to be getting enthusiastic uptake from shipowners for reasons unknown to me. 10,000 ships emitting 100kg a day would be enough to bring atmospheric methane in line.

(Fe seeded to the ocean surface is negligible. This is not a thing to trigger algae production.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane_removal

trompetenaccoun• 2 years ago

That's a misunderstanding. The methane stays in the atmosphere a few years until it reacts with oxygen to CO2. So first you have the multiple times worse effect of CH4 and then you're left with CO2, which is still a greenhouse gas. You're left with CO2 either way, even when you burn the methane. That's why it's so bad. And that's why actually when companies or politicians tell you about "clean" gas, it's very misleading. There is significant leakage in production, transport and storage, before the gas even reaches a consumer.

codeflo5• 2 years ago

Sure, but the question is still whether that carbon came from a fossil source or was part of the cycle to begin with.

Let's say a cow eats grass, produces methane, the methane gets converted into CO2, the grass grows back. No net increase in CO2.

If, on the other hand, the methane came from natural gas, you have permanently added carbon to the cycle.

metaphor2• 2 years ago

So first you have the multiple times worse effect of CH4 and then you're left with CO2, which is still a greenhouse gas.

In case anyone else was wondering, the EPA[1] puts a layman figure on that notional multiple:

> Methane's lifetime in the atmosphere is much shorter than carbon dioxide (CO2), but CH4 is more efficient at trapping radiation than CO2. Pound for pound, the comparative impact of CH4 is 28 times greater than CO2 over a 100-year period.

[1] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/overview-greenhouse-gases#m...

daedrdev• 2 years ago

I think the idea is even in those 12 years, it's way more damaging than CO2 will be. Over 100 years, it is 28 times more damaging than C02, despite not being in the atmosphere for most of that time.

Plus doesn't it just break down into CO2 anyway, meaning that methane does its direct damage, plus creates more CO2.

codeflo5• 2 years ago

It only creates "more CO2" if the carbon atom wasn't part of the carbon cycle to begin with. That's the case for natural gas, but not for biological sources.

Scarblac• 2 years ago

The half life is 12 years.

So after 24 there's still a quarter, after 36 still an eighth, etc. It's worse than CO2 for a very long time, and then it is CO2.

codeflo5• 2 years ago

I just looked it up to be sure. It seems like the mean lifetime is 12 years, which is the figure one uses for calculations. The half life is shorter.

seadan832• 2 years ago

I think this is like saying "my car payments are $1000 per month for the next 10 years, and my rent is $30 per month for the next 80 years. For my financial health, why am I worried about the car payment when I will be paying rent for the rest of my life and the car payments will be over relatively soon?" The answer to that is the situation might not work out well.. If you have a total lifetime budget of $150k, then those car payments are devastating and you would be bankrupt before those 80 years are over.

A kicker, who is to say that methane emissions are one time - and are not themselves increasing and also ongoing?

The analogy is not quite exact, since the "rent payment" is more akin to be on the order of 200 years or so (and not just the one human lifetime), but hopefully it makes the point.

Last, my understanding of the climate science is that we are very worried about getting through even the next 100 years. To explain, there is a window of time that is almost closed where drastic action can arrest further drastic rates of change in climate (by drastic rates, I'm speaking to 1 to 2 degrees C of warming within that time). It is important therefore we get a handle of this problem sooner rather than later (compare us (humans) "fixing" the methane problem 5 years from now compared to 30 years from now). Also keep in mind there are feedback loops that would be irreversible once triggered.

toss1• 2 years ago

The TFA answers it's question

>"So why do we keep launching more?"
>"Despite the small army of probes in orbit, and an increasingly large fleet of methane-detecting planes and drones closer to the ground, our ability to identify where methane is leaking into the atmosphere is still far too limited. "

And a lot of nice detail is provided about particular satellite programs

cabirum• 2 years ago

Because these are either spy sats or even weapons in space disguised as "methane detectors".

alwa• 2 years ago

“Many” seems to mean only a dozen-odd. Which seems like an awfully small number to image the entire earth at meaningful levels of resolution or frequency.

Which also seems to be the article’s lesson.

FWIW, it looks like Starlink alone is up to 5,942 satellites in orbit [0] these days

[0] https://planet4589.org/space/con/star/stats.html

llbeansandrice• 2 years ago

it looks like Starlink alone is up to 5,942 satellites in orbit [0] these days

Starlink operates by far the largest constellation of satellites. Definitely the largest commercial constellation. That's like saying Google "just" serves ~8.5bn search queries/day. I might be mistaking your implication tho.

dylan604• 2 years ago

the field of view from LEO (for Starlink) is so much smaller than from GEO. I'm not sure what the orbit is for the methane satellites, but the number of satellites alone isn't the only factor.

angiosperm3• 2 years ago

If SpaceX cared, the Starlink fleet (both satellites and ground stations) could be the biggest, most sensitive radio telescope in the world, without compromising its usefulness as a network. It points in all directions at the same time. With such sensitivity, a very short "exposure" time is plenty.

Each node records a few cycles of analog waveform at a certain atomic-clock time determined by its position, and forwards that to a common collection point to correlate with the others.

cmyr• 2 years ago

If you're going to post quite sensationalist speculation please at least provide some attempt at a source or rationale. It doesn't really pass the sniff test that any goverment would bother with this banal subterfuge when they are more than capable of putting secret payloads into orbit, and have done so many times[1].

e.g. this, just the first relevant thing I could find https://spaceflightnow.com/2021/04/26/spy-satellite-successf...

iraqmtpizza2• 2 years ago

Secret payloads which are impossible to track via radar or optically either from the ground or via other satellites? Really? Tell me more.

wolverine8762• 2 years ago

Why would they need a cover story? They launch spy and other secret satellites all the time, openly announcing when many are launched.

jandrese2• 2 years ago

The post goes into details about coverage vs. resolution and shows you the data from the satellites and your first thought is that it's all a big lie/coverup?

stratigos• 2 years ago

I would guess for the same reason the government consistently buys $1000 hammers and $5000 toilet seats - to mask some military operation theyd rather not publicly report on.

Alex3917• 2 years ago

FWIW this video has a good explanation of why this new satellite was launched:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhWcFShBAFE

And this New Yorker article has a much more detailed explanation:

https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-climate-action/a-se...

jauntywundrkind• 2 years ago

With permafrost thawing and arctic warming releasing methane clathrates, methane has been on my mind for a while. I wonder if these satellites will also be useful in detecting dispersed wide-area releases like these?

The current publicly available tools like https://methane.jpl.nasa.gov/ seem to focus on showing methane plumes. Which is good & something we are better positioned to do something about. But I wonder if these tools might help us see both impact of the already underway colossally fast climate change we are undergoing, which will only speed up all the faster as these trapped sources make their way out to the atmosphere.

mturmon• 2 years ago

The OP touches on the question of "why the focus on plumes and not on tundra or wetlands", and has a quote from Andrew Thorpe hinting at an answer.

> “These types of emissions are really, really important and very poorly understood,” [Andrew] said. “So I think there’s a heck of a lot of potential to work towards the sectors that have been really hard to do with current technologies.”

I try to keep touch with work in this area. I think it's a combination of SNR and resolution/coverage. The CH4 from a gas leak is very concentrated and so it puts a strong imprint on the spectrum of light passing through it. The natural sources are more diffuse and have less contrast with the surroundings.

(For earlier airborne experiments, the JPL team [which included Andrew] was using a simple matched filter aligned with the methane absorption bands - now they may be using something more complex. This was able to run on a computer on the airplane holding the sensor as it flew over regions of interest.)

Anyway, for sources with a lower CH4 concentration, there will be a much weaker spectral signature. It will be hard to distinguish from other influencers like water, aerosols/dust, etc., or from instrumental effects that may be correlated with location. (E.g., "sometimes high water concentration has spectral effects that appear as high CH4 concentration, so our CH4 values over moist areas are sometimes too high.")

You can improve the effective SNR by accumulating results over a larger area (of space or time). As noted in OP, the ability to get large-area, frequent coverage is quite new.

And also, CH4 moves, so to combine measurements taken at different times, you need to account for transport. This is the difference between measuring "concentration" (a quantity we're more-or-less directly measuring) and "flux" (an emission rate over time, which we don't get to measure directly).

As noted in OP, the plumes were a low-hanging fruit (or as they say, a fruit lying on the ground. ;-)

jandrese2• 2 years ago

There's also the aspect of "Ok, you have detected methane release from melting permafrost, what are you going to do about it?" Capping a leaking oilhead is fairly straightforward. What are you going to do about arctic warming other than the generalized fight against global warming that these projects are already doing?

FranOntanaya• 2 years ago

I'd think it's also useful for economists and investors trying to factor activity from other countries without any middle-people obfuscating the data. That kind of information will always find funding.

jessriedel2• 2 years ago

Putting aside the climate aspects and just concentrating on companies that are trying to identify methane leaks: If I have a device that can accurately see methane leaks, I am very surprised it's really more economical to put them on satellites than to operate them locally. Yes, I get that you can have one device in orbit that can do the job for multiple companies, but satellites are just fantastically expensive. Unlike photography, where the alternative is to use an also-expensive airplane, why can't companies just survey from the ground?

falcolas• 2 years ago

It's probably simply efficiency. You can check an entire pipeline faster from space than from the air, and from the air vs. the ground. Those efficiencies save a fair bit of money, and probably also lead to earlier detection.

And while they are expensive, we're talking about low single-digit millions of dollars for a satellite which has a lifespan of 5+ years. Relatively inexpensive for the companies who would want to use them.

dannyz• 2 years ago

The short answer is to measure methane you rely on methane absorption features. To do that you need to be looking at a source through the methane plume, from a satellite this source is the ground. From a ground instrument you can use the sun as a source, but it limits the times of day/direction/location you can measure from.

photochemsyn2• 2 years ago

Ground-based sampling has different capabilities, e.g. these days you can mount a small mass spectrometer (see the ones going to Mars, the Moon) or related devices on a drone and get data about a much wider range of particulates and compounds. e.g.

"VOC Sampler on a Drone Assisting in Tracing the Potential Sources by a Dispersion Model - Case Study of Industrial Emissions" (2023)

https://aaqr.org/articles/aaqr-23-07-tn-0169

"Two plants which manufacture petrochemical products at an industrial complex in Kaohsiung City, southern Taiwan, were applied as the targets for VOCs sampling and further qualitative and quantitative analysis in the laboratory. Aromatic hydrocarbons, including toluene of 433 ppb, ethylbenzene and xylenes of 100–200 ppb and phenol of 111 ppb were identified."

US EPA also has a similar program.

perrygeo• 2 years ago

satellites are just fantasically expensive

Are they? A CubeSat can be launched for less than $100k, and their payload can contain off-the-shelf consumer hardware. That's what some upper-middle class families pay for an extra car. I think you're overestimating the cost of satellites.

At the same time, you're underestimating the challenges of operating a ground sensor network. How would identify which sites to survey from the ground without a broader search? Would the oil industry get to regulate itself? What about temporal variability or detecting flares? How would you detect new leaks and add new sensors? What about large-scale natural leaks that spread over many kms in inaccessible terrain?

Even assuming you could pinpoint the location of every active methane source ahead of time, how would you get a sensor there? How would you secure access for installation and maintenance? How would you ensure connectivity? How would you monitor in areas controlled by hostile governments?

Each of the hundreds of thousands of sites has its own logistical challenges which explode the cost. And because you need to keep the sensor network up to date, it's a constant operational battle, not a one time expense. Compare that to a satellite: the one-shot launch, then lower cost, lower operations, and superior temporal detection abilities and global coverage - not hard to understand why satellites are preferred.

downWidOutaFite• 2 years ago

I mostly agree but the $100k is only launch cost, it doesn't include the engineering and manufacturing of the satellite or the ongoing operational costs.

Denvercoder9• 2 years ago

satellites are just fantastically expensive

This has become less and less the case over the last decade or so. There are more or less mass-produced satellite buses now, and a SpaceX rideshare puts 150kg into orbit for less than a million. If you go small, you can probably procure, launch and operate a satellite for less than $1000 per day of usage.

chris_va• 2 years ago

(disclaimer I work on climate/methane mapping)

Companies do survey from the ground, and for large facilities there is often permanent monitoring.

Detecting methane from the ground still requires an expensive instrument, and it covers a very tiny area.

Having said that, a lot of methane leaks are from abandoned well heads, and in many places there just are no economic incentives to care about it.

Anyway, satellites are not cheap from a capex standpoint, but they are surprisingly cheap in terms of $/m^2. A camera moving over the earth at 7km/s mapping a 200km swath can cover a million square km for O($1000). Getting a team with expensive equipment into the field for a day on one site could easily be more than that.

vineyardmike• 2 years ago

I used to work on this at a methane monitoring shop. Others have good points.

Monitoring from the ground using methane sensors that detect the gas directly requires a lot of human labor. You need to send people out to often remote locations to set up bulky tripods full of (still expensive) sensors. You need some expensive data backhaul because these places often don’t have cellular access. We were billed by the byte to have a 24/7 contract with uptime guarantees in some of these locations. One big issue is that the companies paying for self-monitoring want suspiciously low false positives (for legal compliance reasons). You have to work with the land owners if you expect them to let you put sensors on their sites. This limits who can access that data compared to a NGO running a satellite, and requires you to filter out “noise” that’s probably not noise to appease the customers. They’re also not very accurate at detecting source in that close distance. Gases tend to quickly rise above where a human can place a sensor array and the wind and environmental factors play a huge impact. Very few companies are willing to stand behind their physics modeling with any kind of SLA. The human cost also shouldn’t be understated: when my coworkers would go and set up these sensors they’d be dizzy for days/weeks due to the emitted gasses they breathed in, our employer basically couldn’t find affordable medical insurance for us.

If you want to use spectroscopy/cameras, you can do it from a (small) distance. But it’s fantastically expensive equipment that only can be used for 1 site. And the “looking up” angle is worse than “looking down”. It’s an open question in the industry if the data can be trusted from these setups. You still have a lot of the complexity of maintaining them and exfiltrating the data.

If you want to just fly a plane… that’s expensive, you need to do it regularly, you still have a lot of “not actively monitored” time, etc.

diracs_stache• 2 years ago

In calibrating satellites getting folks like you to go out with sensors on the ground to send back well vetted data is an expensive and limiting factor. Much cheaper (and often preferred) to do as much as possible from space and do smart ground processing/data analysis to build confidence.

seadan832• 2 years ago

why can't companies just survey from the ground?

From a layman's perspective:

(1) the incentive is not aligned to accurately report leaks [1][2][3][4][5]

(2) Satellites provide global monitoring. This reaches to places/countries/regions that are not regulated, and secondly provides monitoring for natural sources of methane emissions (eg: permafrost). For the latter, even if there is nothing to be done about natural emissions, the more accurate data will provide for better modelling and help humans better understand the Earth's ecosystem.

[1] June 2022: "Oil and gas companies underreported methane leaks, new study shows" https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/06/0...

[2] Oct 2023: "Oil and gas companies are missing significant methane emissions. Here’s how to fix that." https://rmi.org/oil-and-gas-companies-are-missing-significan...

[3] "Gross under-reporting of fugitive methane emissions has big implications for industry" https://ieefa.org/resources/gross-under-reporting-fugitive-m...

[4] July 2023: "Australian Fossil Fuels Giants Severely Underestimate Methane Leaks" - "Fugitive — or hidden — methane emissions in the country are likely underestimated by 80% for coal and 90% for oil and gas, a new report from IEEFA say" https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-07-04/australia...

[5] March 2022 "Stanford-led study: Methane leaks are far worse than estimates, at least in New Mexico, but there’s hope" https://news.stanford.edu/press-releases/2022/03/24/methane-...

jessriedel2• 2 years ago

I'm specifically referring to the cases in the article where companies pay for this.

OtherShrezzing• 2 years ago

Companies and countries tend not to report catastrophic methane leaks (or really any contamination event) unless they're caught in the act. It's absolutely staggering the rate at which methane leaks are identified now that satellite data is being analysed and published.

It'd be much more efficient all round for firms & countries to just test locally & report their methane leaks, but they can't be trusted to do so.

jasonlaramburu• 2 years ago

Ground-based sensors historically undercount methane emissions in 3rd party trials. They have a limited FOV which makes it hard to accurately measure a plume of gas, particularly when the wind blows. I suppose you could create a Dyson sphere of fixed sensors around an O&G asset, but that quickly becomes more expensive than a space based sensor.

Because these leaks can occur spontaneously, you really want real-time, continuous monitoring of a wide area with high resolution. Aerial sensors are impractical for this purpose. Only a large constellation of satellites can offer this.

c_o_n_v_e_x• 2 years ago

I had to dig into this very topic for a previous product that I was managing.

Satellite photography/sensing vs Airplane based vs UAV based vs local vs point detection.

The higher the altitude of your sensor, the larger the swath of land you can sense, but with height comes tradeoffs... cost, weather, satellite availability, latency/how often the satellite is going to be over where you want to sense just to name a few.

Closer to or on the ground means you can get pinpoint accuracy but that comes with increasing cost of labor. Think cost of an airplane or UAV pilot vs an individual walking around with a methane sensor sniffing around flanges, valve stems, etc.

The different approaches are somewhat complimentary. Satellite can you tell you've got a problem area. You can then deploy people on the ground to "zoom in", but if you're operating a ton of sites, you wouldn't start on the ground.

mattgrice• 2 years ago

I can't imagine it's cheaper to do terrestrial search for methane leaks unless your goal is to only find the methane sources you are incentivized to find, and the cost of the satellite gets amortized over thousands of sources and millions to billions of stakeholders.

"putting aside the climate aspects" (???) It's 2024, this is the equivalent of putting a bit "#if 0/#endif" around your comment. I'm taking the time to post this because I hope if you reflect on it, over time, you might realize that the devil actually doesn't need an advocate.

photochemsyn2• 2 years ago

How these satellites work (full text):

"Mapping methane point emissions with the PRISMA spaceborne imaging spectrometer" (2021)

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00344...

"The retrieval of methane from space measurements typically relies on spectrally-resolved measurements of solar radiation reflected by the Earth's surface in the shortwave infrared (SWIR) part of the spectrum (~1600–2500 nm). Methane presents two absorption bands in this region, a weaker one around 1700 nm and a stronger one around 2300 nm. Carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide and especially water vapor also present optical activity in the SWIR (see Fig. 1)"

omgJustTest2• 2 years ago

Methane detection from space![1] will aid in the detection of greenhouse gas emissions from abandoned well-heads, oil-fields, landfills and other large environmental polluters contributing to climate change. The IEA[3] has attributed nearly 30% of global temperature rise to methane, so the detection of the sources is becoming a critical factor in mitigating direct and indrect impacts of climate change. The sensors aboard the MethaneSAT, as well as other deployed capabilities, are largely based IR detections with tunable bandgap materials like HgCdTe[2] arrays. HgCdTe allows for the detection of non-ionizing IR via bandgap tuning of the direct semiconductor CdTe. IR bands, and thus chemical specific detections, can be selected based on the Hg doping. Similar technologies in the James Webb NIRCam enable detection of red-shifted gamma rays that are now heat photons.

[1]https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00600-z

[2]https://www.methanesat.org/satellite/

[3]https://www.iea.org/reports/global-methane-tracker-2022/meth...

jimnotgym• 2 years ago

Imagine the carbon released by putting all the satellites up there!

jjcm• 2 years ago

I was curious on this so did some quick searching around.

Average satellite launch releases 57 tons of Co2 [1]

2.75 million unplugged wells in the US that output "6.6m tons of Co2 worth of methane" [2], or put in another way each well puts out 2.4T of Co2e each per year.

With these numbers each sat would have to prevent 23.75 years worth of a well being uncapped to recoup the cost of launch (so would have to close one well for 23.75 years, or 24 wells for a little less than a year).

[1] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/carbon-footprint-satellite-to...

[2] https://carboncontainmentlab.org/projects/plugging-abandoned....

(someone more informed feel free to correct any of these numbers, I am not an expert)

dotancohen• 2 years ago

For what it's worth, Spacex's next generation rocket burns methane directly, into CO2 which is a less potent greenhouse gas. That means that if solar power is used to create methane from the CO2 in the atmosphere, then the rocket will be carbon neutral. And if waste methane is used (commonly vented to atmosphere because the market is small yet it is expensive to capture) then each launch will actually be a net benefit for reducing atmospheric greenhouse gases.

tomtomistaken• 2 years ago

12 years after eliminating the biggest part of human made methane emissions, we could see significant cooling effects, possibly helping to prevent tipping points.

gerdesj• 2 years ago

"we could see significant cooling effects"

Cooling? Cutting down on (CO2/CH4) emissions will likely merely slow the heating effects somewhat, that are already locked in.

Think of a slightly slower boiled frog instead of one going skiing for a laugh.

AnarchismIsCool• 2 years ago

Oh hey, I wrote some of the flight software for one of those programs.

Something to note for those not familiar with satellite GIS stuff, the more satellites you have up there taking measurements, the more frequently you get data on emitters. Also, you can combine the datasets and sometimes increase the effective resolution. Additionally some are point trackers and some are mappers, they serve different purposes for localizing vs quantifying emissions.

Finally, there are some politics involved with various groups, some want access to data to name and shame, some want to do climate research, etc. It's a bit complicated on that front.

khaki54• 2 years ago

I think this is overall a positive and good approach to control climate change. 1. It targets methane which has a huge short term effect on global warming vs CO2 2. It doesn't blame or target consumers with high annoyance, low value solutions like paper straws. 3. It reduces waste. We shouldn't be wasting natural gas, it's a valuable resource, and it may be economically viable to use even minor resource pockets in the future. 4. Companies shouldn't be able to freely pollute, including long term flaring, if it's so simple to cap these things. 5. This is something that's actually measurable and trackable. Analysts can identify the top 100,000 sites and governments and NGOs can go down the list to close / capture them and also show progress publically.

Why are there so many methane satellites?

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