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Carbon Mapper’s ultra-precise Tanager-1 is headed to space.
Yet another methane satellite is launching into orbit Friday, as early as 11:19 a.m. Pacific time, on a SpaceX rocket. Developed by a coalition of public and private partners and led by the nonprofit Carbon Mapper, its precision imaging helps fill a gap in the methane detection universe and complements the abilities of MethaneSAT, the Environmental Defense Fund-developed, Google-backed satellite launched back in March.
Riley Duren, CEO of Carbon Mapper, likens his company’s satellite to a telephoto lens, saying it “has a resolution that's about 10 times higher than the MethaneSAT instrument” — although the tradeoff is that the field of view is about 10 times smaller. The ultimate goal is to identify “super-emitters” of methane and carbon dioxide at the facility level. So while MethaneSAT can detect the total emissions emanating from a particular basin, state, or country, Carbon Mapper can zoom in to figure out what’s going on within 50 meters of accuracy so that operators and regulators can be notified.
Both companies use an imaging technology known as spectroscopy, which involves splitting the light reflected by Earth’s surface into its constituent wavelengths. Methane and carbon dioxide each have their own spectroscopic signature. “It's not unlike being able to perceive the distinction in human fingerprints,” Duren told me.
The Carbon Mapper Coalition satellite, called Tanager-1, came from a partnership between Planet Labs, which developed the satellite, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which developed the particular spectrometer used onboard. Duren helped create the tech during his nearly 28-year career at JPL, where his research revealed the outsized importance of super-emitters. That helped inspire Duren to found Carbon Mapper in 2020, though until now the organization has mostly done suborbital aerial surveys to track methane and carbon dioxide emissions.
Promisingly, he’s found that distributing his team’s findings often leads to a rapid response. “When we've shared our data with oil and gas companies, landfill operators, and regulators, what they tell us is nearly half of the emissions that we're reporting were previously unknown,” Duren told me. “And in many cases, they can quickly repair them.”
The data from these surveys is publicly accessible on the Carbon Mapper data portal, and the data from Tanager-1 will be published there as well. In addition to Planet Labs and JPL, other coalition partners include the California Air Resources Board, University of Arizona, Arizona State University, and RMI. To date, Carbon Mapper has raised over $130 million in philanthropic funding, from donors including the High Tide Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, and the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment.
Ultimately, Carbon Mapper aims to launch a constellation of more than 10 satellites, which together will detect and track up to 90% of high-emitting methane sources with near-daily frequency. But this will require funding beyond what the philanthropic sector is likely to pony up.
“Scaling up this to the full constellation and sustaining it will hinge on the ability of governments and the private sector to pay for data,” Duren told me. (MethaneSAT is also philanthropically supported.) “We're hopeful that as these programs scale up and we demonstrate their utility and the regulators depend on them, that we'll see governments begin to match what philanthropy has started,” Durian said.
If you want to watch the launch live, you can do so here.
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In the closing minutes of the first presidential debate tonight, Donald Trump’s attacks on Kamala Harris took an odd, highly specific, and highly Teutonic turn. It might not have made sense to many viewers, but it fit into the overall debate’s unusually substantive focus on energy policy.
“You believe in things that the American people don’t believe in,” he said, addressing Harris. “You believe in things like, we’re not gonna frack. We’re not gonna take fossil fuel. We’re not gonna do — things that are going to make this country strong, whether you like it or not.”
“Germany tried that and within one year, they were back to building normal energy plants,” he continued. “We’re not ready for it.”
What is he talking about? Let’s start by stipulating that Harris has renounced her previous support for banning fracking. During the debate, she bragged that the United States has hit an all-time high for oil and gas production during her vice presidency.
But why bring Germany into it? At the risk of sane-washing the former president, Trump appears to be referencing what German politicians call the Energiewiende, or energy turnaround. Since 2010, Germany has sought to transition from its largest historic energy sources, including coal and nuclear energy, to renewables and hydropower.
The Energiewiende is often discussed inside and outside of Germany as a climate policy, and it has helped achieve global climate goals by, say, helping to push down the global price of solar panels. But as an observant reader might have already noticed, its goals are not entirely emissions-related: Its leaders have also hoped to use the Energiewiende to phase out nuclear power, which is unpopular in Germany but which does not produce carbon emissions.
The transition has accomplished some of its goals: The country says that it is on target to meet its 2030 climate targets. But it ran into trouble after Russia invaded Ukraine, because Germany obtained more than half of its natural gas, and much of its oil and coal besides, from Russia. Germany turned back on some of its nuclear plants — it has since shut them off again — and increased its coal consumption. It also began importing fossil fuels from other countries.
In order to shore up its energy supply, Germany is also planning to build 10 gigawatts of new natural gas plants by 2030, although it says that these facilities will be “hydrogen ready,” meaning that they could theoretically run on the zero-carbon fuel hydrogen. German automakers, who have lagged at building electric vehicles, have also pushed for policies that support “e-fuels,” or low-carbon liquid fuels. These fuels would — again, theoretically — allow German firms to keep building internal combustion engines.
So perhaps that’s not exactly what Trump said, to put it mildly — but it is true that to cope with the Ukraine war and the loss of nuclear power, Germany has had to fall back on fossil fuels. Of course, at the same time, more than 30% of German electricity now comes from wind and solar energy. In other words, in Germany, renewables are just another kind of “normal energy plant.”
Hunter Biden also made an appearance in Trump’s answer to the debate’s one climate question.
Well, it happened — over an hour into the debate, but it happened: the presidential candidates were asked directly about climate change. ABC News anchor Linsey Davis put the question to Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, and their respective answers were both surprising and totally not.
Harris responded to the question by laying out the successes of Biden’s energy policy and in particular, the Inflation Reduction Act (though she didn’tmention it by name). “I am proud that as vice president, over the last four years, we have invested a trillion dollars in a clean energy economy,” Harris noted.
The vice president immediately followed this up, however, by pointing out that gas production has also increased to “historic levels,” under the Biden-Harris administration. This framing, highlighting an all-of-the-above approach to energy, is consistent with Harris’s comments earlier in the debate, whenshe claimed to support fracking and investing in “diverse sources of energy.” Harris went on to reiterate the biggest wins of the Inflation Reduction Act, namely, “800,000 new manufacturing jobs,” and shouted out her endorsement from the United Auto Workers and its President Shawn Fain.
Trump, who earlier in the debate called himself “a big fan of solar” before questioning the amount of land it takes up, started off his response by once again claiming that the Biden-Harris administration is building Chinese-owned EV plants in Mexico (they are not). Then Trump veered completely off topic and rounded out his answer by ranting about Biden (both Joe and Hunter). “You know, Biden doesn’t go after people because, supposedly, China paid him millions of dollars,” Trump noted. “He’s afraid to do it between him and his son, they get all this money from Ukraine.”
Trump’s answer included no reference to climate or clean energy — but it did include a shout out to “the mayor of Moscow’s wife,” so there’s that.
Is that a problem? Let’s do the math.
Former President Donald Trump has been warming up to the idea of electric vehicles in recent months, and he used the debate podium on Tuesday night to announce that “I’m a big fan of solar.” But don’t get too excited: He apparently can’t name three of their albums.
During a heated back-and-forth over Vice President Kamala Harris’ stance on fracking, Trump started to get worked up about what will happen if Democrats win the election. “They’ll go back to destroying our country and oil will be dead, fossil fuel will be dead,” he warned. “We’ll go back to windmills and we’ll go back to solar, where they need a whole desert to get some energy to come out. You ever see a solar plant?”
Trump went on: “By the way, I’m a big fan of solar, but they take 400, 500 acres of desert soil.”
Trump has a history of exaggeration, but this is neither particularly hyperbolic nor as concerning as Trump would have you believe. About 34,000 acres of public land are currently devoted to solar energy, and a common estimate is that the U.S. would need to expand solar to an additional 700,000 acres to meet 2035 renewable energy goals. That’s about 1,100 square miles, or 1,555 Trump-sized solar farms (or 0.031115% of the entire United States, per Clean Technica).
And while it’s true that most utility-scale solar photovoltaic facilities are only a handful of acres, it only takes about five to seven acres to generate a megawatt — so a project of Trump’s reckoning would generate about 65 megawatts, which, as Mads Rønne Almassalkhi, an associate professor of electrical and biomedical engineering at the University of Vermont, pointed out, isn’t all that shabby:
The U.S. government also recently determined that some 31 million acres of public land in just 11 states are not on “protected lands, sensitive cultural resources, and important wildlife habitat” and are close to transmission lines or “previously disturbed lands,” and therefore hypothetically suitable for solar development. To put it in simpler terms, solar takes up a fair bit of land but: Desert big.
To be sure, there are absolutely valid concerns and debates to be had over siting and the environmental impact of solar farms in America, regardless of how small their ultimate relative footprint will be. And Trump could have raised those arguments. But from what he showed us on Tuesday, he doesn’t make a very convincing fan.