When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission.An artist’s illustration of a GHGSat methane-measuring spacecraft in orbit. | Credit: GHGSatWhen it comes to greenhouse gas emissions, carbon dioxide gets the lion’s share of global attention.But methane is the second-largest contributor to human-caused global warming. A high proportion of methane emissions comes from the energy sector, often from concentrated “point sources” such as flare stacks, coal vents and open-pit mines. To help reduce those emissions, we must first identify the major culprits — and new satellite data is helping us do just that.AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementUsing high-resolution observations from the GHGSat satellite constellation, researchers have produced a global, facility-level view of methane emissions, identifying thousands of individual oil, gas and coal sites that are releasing the greenhouse gas into Earth’s atmosphere.”This is the first global gridded estimate of annual methane emissions from facility-scale measurements, an advancement in measurement-based accounting that is due to the comprehensive scale of GHGSat’s satellite constellation to measure methane worldwide,” said Dylan Jervis of GHGSat Inc., lead author of a new study on the findings published Dec. 11 in the journal Science.”This information will be useful to improve understanding and predictions of methane emissions, and, therefore, provide information that is useful to direct mitigation efforts,” Jervis told Space.com.Traditionally, scientists have measured methane emissions with a mix of bottom-up inventories, which estimate emissions based on industry activity but can miss short-term fluctuations like leaks, and top-down atmospheric measurements, which detect methane concentrations directly but lack the resolution to pinpoint specific sources. Neither can paint a very precise picture of global methane emissions from the energy sector. But the GHGSat constellation, run by the Canadian company GHGSat, bridges that gap by combining meter-scale spatial resolution with global coverage.AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementAnalyzing GHGSat observations of methane plumes collected in 2023, the team estimated annual methane emissions from 3,114 oil, gas and coal facilities worldwide that totaled about 9 million tons (8.3 million metric tons) per year.Example GHGSat methane plumes, detected from a coal vent, oil & …
