A new satellite will track climate-warming methane pollution : NPR

VANDENBERG SPACE FORCE BASE, Calif. — Not removed from the Pacific Ocean, the place simply to the south, oil platforms dot the horizon, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket blasted into house Monday with dozens of satellites on board.

4 miles away from the launch web site, a crowd together with scientists, engineers, and their households erupted into celebration. They have been applauding largely for one satellite tv for pc on board: MethaneSAT, which is constructed to detect methane. That is a gasoline that within the quick time period packs a good greater planet-warming punch than carbon dioxide.

MethaneSAT – led by the Environmental Protection Fund – may have a focused focus: to identify methane from the oil and gasoline business, which leaks at numerous elements of the fossil gas manufacturing course of. Typically oil firms intentionally burn methane gasoline if they can not pipe it someplace.

Lowering methane air pollution might help the world meet its climate targets, however for years researchers had little understanding of the place precisely methane leaks have been coming from. Recent projects have helped give a clearer image, however the information hasn’t all the time been public, or exact – particularly from oil fields, says Steven Hamburg, chief scientist for the Environmental Protection Fund (EDF) who led the MethaneSAT undertaking.

The purpose of MethaneSAT is to have a granular image of the place precisely methane comes from in oil and gasoline operations across the globe, in locations like Texas, Russia and Nigeria. “For the primary time [we’ll] have prime quality empirical information for a whole sector throughout the globe,” Hamburg says.

The oil and gasoline business has traditionally had a tradition of confidentiality, says Antoine Halff, chief analyst at Kayrros, a local weather analytics agency. “They prefer to preserve their information personal,” he says. “There’s, I feel, a cultural discomfort with the transparency offered by unbiased monitoring.”

When this satellite tv for pc is totally operational within the coming months, it can present information that will probably be free to the general public. That can permit governments, researchers and others to have an unbiased view from house of most oil and gasoline operations, says Adam Brandt, a professor within the Division of Vitality Science and Engineering at Stanford College who was not concerned with the undertaking.

“The great thing about having MethaneSAT,” Brandt says, is “we do not have to ask [oil companies] permission properly to go on web site and make measurements, proper?”

The choice to take a look at oil and gasoline air pollution

About 30% of global warming comes from human-caused methane air pollution. Mark Brownstein, a senior vp at EDF, says the query for a very long time was how a lot methane comes from the oil and gasoline sector?

Different sectors additionally create methane air pollution. Agriculture – particularly gas-belching cows and gas-emitting manure – is the single biggest source of methane in the U.S., in keeping with information from the Environmental Safety Company (EPA).

However specializing in the oil and gasoline sector was strategic, Hamburg says. Oil and gasoline has a concentrated variety of gamers, with greater budgets to scrub up their operations. “The flexibility to remediate is way better and it is cost-effective,” he says.

Previously six years EDF put collectively a workforce – together with scientists from Harvard College and different teams – to construct a satellite tv for pc to get a greater image of the oil business. The satellite tv for pc has sensors particularly designed to select up the fingerprint of the methane molecule. The sensors now orbiting in house will then ship information again to Earth within the coming months.

The hope is that regulators will use this information, Hamburg says. “There’s curiosity. There’s conversations, not simply with the U.S. EPA, however in different governments and different regulators,” he says.

Late final yr the EPA made a new rule that for the first time requires oil and gasoline operators to monitor, detect, and fix methane leaks.

A spokesperson for the EPA stated in an emailed assertion that the EPA’s new rule “has a mechanism for third-party notifiers utilizing accepted distant sensing applied sciences to be licensed – enabling them to inform EPA of methane super-emitter occasions.” Tremendous-emitter occasions occur when giant quantities of methane are launched. “EDF, together with different house owners of distant sensing applied sciences, might apply to be licensed,” the EPA stated.

Aaron Padilla, vp of company coverage on the American Petroleum Institute, the nation’s largest oil and gasoline foyer, says his business has a few years of expertise utilizing their very own satellites and applied sciences to determine after which scale back methane emissions.

“Our business’s expertise exhibits that one actually wants to make use of a variety of applied sciences working collectively throughout their strengths and weaknesses with a view to get a very correct image of the place you may have methane emissions,” Padilla says.

In the end, Hamburg says he hopes that information from the MethaneSAT will transfer extra oil and gasoline firms to scrub up methane air pollution.

“That is an business that acknowledges that their repute, their markets are below menace,” Hamburg says. “So, if you are going to compete in a world by which the demand goes down, you wish to show that you are a higher actor.”