Why are there so many methane satellites?
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[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...
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)
From this Guardian article: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/mar/06/revealed...
Per the article you cited, the 6.6m tonnes (not tons) of CO2e does not have a lot of empirical measurements behind it, and it may be much higher. That's one of the things these satellites can help to improve.
I think a better way to look at it is comparing the 57t of emissions with other sources of CO2 emissions. For example, a single cross-country flight puts out in the range of 300-350t of CO2 (~1t per passenger). So launching 6 of these satellites in separate launches would be equivalent to a single airliner flight, i.e. negligible in the grand scheme of things.
One would imagine that monitoring of this sort is critical infrastructure for monitoring remote & continuous emitters.
Someone has already motivated many of these science missions, and they are not funded, to my knowledge, by industry. These are already rolled into govt investments so really the argument is not total CO2 balance, but what technologies can be deployed next year that will give you continuous reductions over time.
_Many_ people will argue their clean-tech _will eventually_ provide savings, not many can be installed next year at scale.
This is an obvious choice IMO, if for no other reason than people cannot out-right emit with no consequences.
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.
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...
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.
"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.
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.
It's possible to reduce this number by taking advantages of labor conditions and goodwill, but that turns out to be a ton of legwork if you want a reliable team in the area year after year.
For example, in an anthro field school you might source local labor by identifying people who want to learn about their ancestors, and you'll expect a lot of community outreach and Q&A sessions around what you're studying.
You could attempt a similar approach for studying methane but I'd personally expect the Q&A sessions to include a heavy undertone of "convince me we shouldn't just kill the people involved", and all of my arguments against would be from the perspective of a system they don't really give a shit about. I'd certainly never put myself in that position.
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.
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.
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.
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-...
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.
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.
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.
"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.
>>"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
"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)"
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.
>> “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. ;-)
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.
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.
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)
(Fe seeded to the ocean surface is negligible. This is not a thing to trigger algae production.)
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.
Accelerating the "natural" cycle is bad even if there is no net increase. A massive forest fire technically doesn't cause any net increase in CO2, but releasing that much CO2 at once causes a lot of problems that wouldn't happen if the same amount were released over hundreds of years as those trees died and decayed.
I'm sure some people would argue that burning oil and gas isn't a net increase either, because all of that carbon came from the atmosphere originally. The important question is what emissions will make life worse for humanity, and what can be done to avoid them. Avoidable methane emissions cause real-world problems regardless of their source.
I don't think that matters anymore. At some point, we wanted to reduce atmospheric CO2 to a tolerable level and an obvious approach was to not add to natural emissions.
Now we just need to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere. It doesn't do different things based on its source. If we can reduce it by cutting gas production or by cutting some natural source, we should do it.
I think we're only able see some carbon sources as "outside the cycle" due to our infinitesimal lifespans.
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...
If I may be permitted to reiterate: 28x GWP impact factor. Cherry-picking CH4 is hardly premature optimization...it's pure low-hanging fruit!
Consider this paper published in Nature Communications[1] which analyzed CH4 emissions from just low production natural gas well sites in the US. From the abstract:
>> Here, we integrate national site-level O&G production data and previously reported site-level CH4 measurement data (n = 240) and find that low production well sites are a disproportionately large source of US O&G well site CH4 emissions, emitting more than 4 (95% confidence interval: 3—6) teragrams, 50% more than the total CH4 emissions from the Permian Basin, one of the world’s largest O&G producing regions. We estimate low production well sites represent roughly half (37—75%) of all O&G well site CH4 emissions, and a production-normalized CH4 loss rate of more than 10%—a factor of 6—12 times higher than the mean CH4 loss rate of 1.5% for all O&G well sites in the US.
...and further into the paper:
>> At low production well sites, field observations report a common theme revolving around the issue of well site equipment negligence and disrepair as the primary driver of CH4 emissions. Most proximately, recent work by Deighton et al. documents several of these maintenance-related issues, including, for example, (i) leaks at fittings and joints, (ii) leaks and vents from rusted pump jacks, tanks, and other onsite gathering infrastructure, and (iii) evidence of well site neglect or poor maintenance, such as wellheads or casings covered in weeds or fallen trees.
In summary, an estimated 4 teragrams (4 million metric tons) annual CH4 leakage as a direct consequence of operations/maintenance negligence in just the US. Scaled by 28x GWP factor and now we're in the ballpark of 112 million metric tons CO2 equivalence.
Sounds like a big number, but I need a more relatable proxy to square that figure. This source[2] suggests a typical adult human generates 0.9 kg CO2 per day just breathing. Therefore, the value prop of dropping the penal hammer hard on negligent US low production natural gas site operators implies a CO2 sequestration equivalence of offing 341 million warm adult human bodies...effectively the entire US population! Apologies for the morbid anolog, but it's perhaps much easier to internalize impact by this measure.
Only a secondary goal? Sorry, the notion doesn't pass this layman's ballpark sniff test.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-29709-3
[2] https://www.globe.gov/explore-science/scientists-blog/archiv...
Plus doesn't it just break down into CO2 anyway, meaning that methane does its direct damage, plus creates more CO2.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
The customer antennas would make poor radio telescope because the antennas are small. If using array of small antennas as radio telescopes were possible, we would see them. Using interferometry requires measuring positions and times to sub-wavelength. The Square Kilometer Array is the closest, but it is small extent, with large dishes, and many low-frequency antennas.
e.g. this, just the first relevant thing I could find https://spaceflightnow.com/2021/04/26/spy-satellite-successf...
1: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DTW_zc_W0AEH3Un?format=jpg&name=...