Eye in the Sky Could Detect Planet-Warming Plumes on the Ground

Tom Ingersoll, a longtime satellite entrepreneur, admits being startled by a call he received last year: A nonprofit foundation wanted to build a satellite and launch it into orbit to help fight climate change. “I thought, ‘Wow, that’s kind of crazy.'”

In February, he signed on as the project’s manager, after having taken a long look at the technologies required. “It’s hard, but we could probably pull it off,” he said.

Now the rest of the world can decide for itself. On Wednesday, Fred Krupp, the president of the Environmental Defense Fund, was scheduled to announce plans for MethaneSAT, an orbital eye in the sky that could monitor industrial methane leaks all over the planet.

Methane remains one of the thorniest climate problems. It is the major component of natural gas, which produces half the carbon dioxide of coal when burned to run electric plants. But when methane leaks, it is a potent greenhouse gas that traps more than 80 times as much heat as carbon dioxide in its first 20 years in the atmosphere.

But figuring out where methane emissions are coming from is a major challenge. The colorless, odorless gas has proved difficult to measure at the source of leaks without nearby access to the sites. Early attempts by the Environmental Protection Agency to determine the scope of the problem significantly underestimated emissions.

Methane leaks are relatively inexpensive to fix, and stopping leaks allows energy companies to sell more gas. The International Energy Agency has estimated that as much as 50 percent of the 84 million tons of methane emitted by the oil and gas industry every year — from leaky wells and pipes and other causes — “can be mitigated at no net cost, because the value of the captured methane could cover the abatement measures.”

The Environmental Defense Fund has worked for many years on methane issues; it organized a five-year, $20 million research effort into leaks in the United States across the production and supply network. That research, which helped the EPA adjust its national emissions estimates, involved local measurements from ground instruments and airplane flyovers. But such methods are not always feasible — or welcomed — in other countries.

To address the problem of finding leaks around the world, a recent report from the National Academy of Sciences called for methane monitoring from space, where international access is not a problem. “Satellite measurements are critical,” said David T. Allen, a professor of chemical engineering at the University of Texas who served on the committee that wrote the report.

Some government-launched science satellites do monitor methane, but their instruments lack the resolution to pinpoint sources on the ground. Some commercial ventures also detect methane from space, but their data is proprietary.

MethaneSAT, by comparison, is designed to detect emissions across the planet with sufficiently high resolution to identify sources. The organization plans to make the data publicly available so that companies, policymakers and regulators can take action.

Identifying major sources of leaks could help governments and industry coalitions work together to address the problem, said Daniel J. Jacob, a professor of atmospheric chemistry and environmental engineering at Harvard. “How can you do climate policy for methane if you don’t know where the sources are?” he said.