High in the sunlit silence 300 miles out in space, a small satellite scans the Earth for methane—from refineries, drilling rigs, landfills and myriad other sources. It is one of a fleet of nine such orbiters, with three more planned for launch by year's end. They are spy satellites, if you will, sent to protect the climate from greenhouse gases, or GHGs.
The satellites are operated by a Canadian company called GHGSat, and in a playful spirit, they've been named after children of some of the company's employees—Iris, Luca, Penny, Diako and so forth. But the mission is serious. Methane is less plentiful than carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, but as a greenhouse gas, it is 80 times more potent. The United Nations says it may be responsible for a third of the Earth's warming since the industrial revolution.
"I had always wanted to bring space down to earth and apply space technology to needs that people can benefit from," says Stéphane Germain, the president of GHGSat. "Now we can do that." He started the company in 2011, and it launched its first satellite, nicknamed Claire, in 2016. Each satellite is about the size of a microwave oven. They're inexpensive by space standards, partly because they hitch rides on low-cost rockets from SpaceX that launch many satellites at a time.
Methane, odorless and colorless, traps heat in the atmosphere the way carbon dioxide does, but many of its sources are more concentrated. It's the main ingredient in the natural gas used in power plants. It's a byproduct of oil drilling. It escapes from coal mines. There are other, more diffuse sources—livestock cause a lot, and it rises from rice paddies and rotting garbage—but as Germain puts it, "The larger industrial leaks are a short-term thing that we can obviously do something about and have a significant impact at relatively low cost."
You would think that GHGSat would become a darling of the enforcers who want to whip those environmental offenders into line—governments, regulatory agencies, scientists, perhaps advocacy groups—and you'd be partly right. But actually, GHGSat says, most of its business is with oil, gas, landfill and mining companies—the largest industrial emitters of methane. Other clients include government agencies, climate researchers and financial services companies that want to make sure they are making environmentally sustainable investments.
Most companies are quiet about it, but some energy giants, such as Chevron, Shell and the multinational TotalEnergies, have publicly cited GHGSat in their efforts to be environmentally responsible.
"Our goal is simple—keep methane in the pipe," said Michael K. Wirth, the chairman and CEO of Chevron, in a 2022 report on controlling methane. "Our efforts to reduce methane emissions mean more natural gas is available to heat homes, generate power and meet the many other needs of modern society."
That sounds well-meaning, and Germain says he's met industry people who honestly seem to want to do the right thing, but ultimately, he says, money talks. In the United States, last year's Inflation Reduction Act will impose increasingly stiff fines for methane leaks starting in 2024. Globally, more than 100 countries have pledged to cut their methane output 30 percent by 2030. So it's in a company's interest to clean up its act before someone else cleans it up for them.
"I do fundamentally believe that in a capitalist society, businesses are going to do only what they absolutely have to do, and that's OK," Germain says. "But there have to be market incentives."
Jean-Francois Gauthier, GHGSat's vice president for strategy, says the company works readily with environmental advocacy groups and the United Nations, but its core approach is to help companies find and cut their own emissions, not shame them publicly into doing it. "Early on we realized that our customers, the people who are the emitters, are also the ones who have to fix those leaks," he says. "If they feel that their back is being pushed against the wall by some technology that's 'new and unproven,' then it's very easy to start dismissing the technology outright."
GHGSat's satellites pass over any given spot once every few days—more comprehensive and cost-effective than using planes or drones or sending out engineers with handheld sensors. The satellites have their limits; they need daylight and clear weather to make readings, and they're not good at small, slow seepages. But under good conditions they can detect a leak of less than 220 pounds per hour—roughly equivalent to the amount of air blowing through two hair dryers.
It adds up. In 2022, when it had fewer satellites, GHGSat says it detected enough escaping methane to equal the greenhouse gases from 39 million gasoline-powered cars.
And there are other efforts underway. NASA and the European Space Agency have detectors in orbit. The Environmental Defense Fund, an advocacy group, is working on a satellite of its own. Companies and government agencies use planes, drones and ground-based detectors to provide more detail when a leak is detected from space. Scientists say there is urgency to this work; research suggests that before satellite detection, the amount of methane getting into the atmosphere was vastly underestimated.
"We need data now and we need data from as many places as we can get it," says Fran Reuland of RMI, an environmental nonprofit. "And so frequent satellite monitoring is great, as an important piece of that puzzle."
Problem solved? Not yet. GHGSat says it needs to launch more satellites for more complete coverage, and their sensors need improvement to find gas over open water (think of offshore drilling rigs). But methane may, in a way, be low-hanging fruit in global efforts to stabilize the climate, and easier to bring under control than carbon dioxide. At a refinery or pumping station, the fix may be as simple as closing a valve. You first need to know the valve was open, though, and satellite detectors are an efficient way to find it.
"It's an exciting time to be in methane," quips Germain. "I never thought I'd say that."
Correction (Sept. 7, 2023, 14:29 EDT): The spelling of Fran Reuland's name has been corrected from an earlier version, with Newsweek's apologies.
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