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Over a dozen methane satellites are now circling the Earth — and more are on the way.
On Monday afternoon, a satellite the size of a washing machine hitched a ride on a SpaceX rocket and was launched into orbit. MethaneSAT, as the new satellite is called, is the latest to join more than a dozen other instruments currently circling the Earth monitoring emissions of the ultra-powerful greenhouse gas methane. But it won’t be the last. Over the next several months, at least two additional methane-detecting satellites from the U.S. and Japan are scheduled to join the fleet.
There’s a joke among scientists that there are so many methane-detecting satellites in space that they are reducing global warming — not just by providing essential data about emissions, but by blocking radiation from the sun.
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. Like carbon dioxide, sources of methane around the world are numerous and diffuse. They can be natural, like wetlands and oceans, or man-made, like decomposing manure on farms, rotting waste in landfills, and leaks from oil and gas operations.
There are big, unanswered questions about methane, about which sources are driving the most emissions, and consequently, about tackling climate change, that scientists say MethaneSAT will help solve. But even then, some say we’ll need to launch even more instruments into space to really get to the bottom of it all.
Measuring methane from space only began in 2009 with the launch of the Greenhouse Gases Observing Satellite, or GOSAT, by Japan’s Aerospace Exploration Agency. Previously, most of the world’s methane detectors were on the ground in North America. GOSAT enabled scientists to develop a more geographically diverse understanding of major sources of methane to the atmosphere.
Soon after, the Environmental Defense Fund, which led the development of MethaneSAT, began campaigning for better data on methane emissions. Through its own, on-the-ground measurements, the group discovered that the Environmental Protection Agency’s estimates of leaks from U.S. oil and gas operations were totally off. EDF took this as a call to action. Because methane has such a strong warming effect, but also breaks down after about a decade in the atmosphere, curbing methane emissions can slow warming in the near-term.
“Some call it the low hanging fruit,” Steven Hamburg, the chief scientist at EDF leading the MethaneSAT project, said during a press conference on Friday. “I like to call it the fruit lying on the ground. We can really reduce those emissions and we can do it rapidly and see the benefits.”
But in order to do that, we need a much better picture than what GOSAT or other satellites like it can provide.
In the years since GOSAT launched, the field of methane monitoring has exploded. Today, there are two broad categories of methane instruments in space. Area flux mappers, like GOSAT, take global snapshots. They can show where methane concentrations are generally higher, and even identify exceptionally large leaks — so-called “ultra-emitters.” But the vast majority of leaks, big and small, are invisible to these instruments. Each pixel in a GOSAT image is 10 kilometers wide. Most of the time, there’s no way to zoom into the picture and see which facilities are responsible.
Jacob, D. J., Varon, D. J., Cusworth, D. H., Dennison, P. E., Frankenberg, C., Gautam, R., Guanter, L., Kelley, J., McKeever, J., Ott, L. E., Poulter, B., Qu, Z., Thorpe, A. K., Worden, J. R., and Duren, R. M.: Quantifying methane emissions from the global scale down to point sources using satellite observations of atmospheric methane, Atmos. Chem. Phys., 22, 9617–9646, https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-22-9617-2022, 2022.
Point source imagers, on the other hand, take much smaller photos that have much finer resolution, with pixel sizes down to just a few meters wide. That means they provide geographically limited data — they have to be programmed to aim their lenses at very specific targets. But within each image is much more actionable data.
For example, GHGSat, a private company based in Canada, operates a constellation of 12 point-source satellites, each one about the size of a microwave oven. Oil and gas companies and government agencies pay GHGSat to help them identify facilities that are leaking. Jean-Francois Gauthier, the director of business development at GHGSat, told me that each image taken by one of their satellites is 12 kilometers wide, but the resolution for each pixel is 25 meters. A snapshot of the Permian Basin, a major oil and gas producing region in Texas, might contain hundreds of oil and gas wells, owned by a multitude of companies, but GHGSat can tell them apart and assign responsibility.
“We’ll see five, 10, 15, 20 different sites emitting at the same time and you can differentiate between them,” said Gauthier. “You can see them very distinctly on the map and be able to say, alright, that’s an unlit flare, and you can tell which company it is, too.” Similarly, GHGSat can look at a sprawling petrochemical complex and identify the exact tank or pipe that has sprung a leak.
But between this extremely wide-angle lens, and the many finely-tuned instruments pointing at specific targets, there’s a gap. “It might seem like there’s a lot of instruments in space, but we don’t have the kind of coverage that we need yet, believe it or not,” Andrew Thorpe, a research technologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory told me. He has been working with the nonprofit Carbon Mapper on a new constellation of point source imagers, the first of which is supposed to launch later this year.
The reason why we don’t have enough coverage has to do with the size of the existing images, their resolution, and the amount of time it takes to get them. One of the challenges, Thorpe said, is that it’s very hard to get a continuous picture of any given leak. Oil and gas equipment can spring leaks at random. They can leak continuously or intermittently. If you’re just getting a snapshot every few weeks, you may not be able to tell how long a leak lasted, or you might miss a short but significant plume. Meanwhile, oil and gas fields are also changing on a weekly basis, Joost de Gouw, an atmospheric chemist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, told me. New wells are being drilled in new places — places those point-source imagers may not be looking at.
“There’s a lot of potential to miss emissions because we’re not looking,” he said. “If you combine that with clouds — clouds can obscure a lot of our observations — there are still going to be a lot of times when we’re not actually seeing the methane emissions.”
De Gouw hopes MethaneSAT will help resolve one of the big debates about methane leaks. Between the millions of sites that release small amounts of methane all the time, and the handful of sites that exhale massive plumes infrequently, which is worse? What fraction of the total do those bigger emitters represent?
Paul Palmer, a professor at the University of Edinburgh who studies the Earth’s atmospheric composition, is hopeful that it will help pull together a more comprehensive picture of what’s driving changes in the atmosphere. Around the turn of the century, methane levels pretty much leveled off, he said. But then, around 2007, they started to grow again, and have since accelerated. Scientists have reached different conclusions about why.
“There’s lots of controversy about what the big drivers are,” Palmer told me. Some think it’s related to oil and gas production increasing. Others — and he’s in this camp — think it’s related to warming wetlands. “Anything that helps us would be great.”
MethaneSAT sits somewhere between the global mappers and point source imagers. It will take larger images than GHGSat, each one 200 kilometers wide, which means it will be able to cover more ground in a single day. Those images will also contain finer detail about leaks than GOSAT, but they won’t necessarily be able to identify exactly which facilities the smaller leaks are coming from. Also, unlike with GHGSat, MethaneSAT’s data will be freely available to the public.
EDF, which raised $88 million for the project and spent nearly a decade working on it, says that one of MethaneSAT’s main strengths will be to provide much more accurate basin-level emissions estimates. That means it will enable researchers to track the emissions of the entire Permian Basin over time, and compare it with other oil and gas fields in the U.S. and abroad. Many countries and companies are making pledges to reduce their emissions, and MethaneSAT will provide data on a relevant scale that can help track progress, Maryann Sargent, a senior project scientist at Harvard University who has been working with EDF on MethaneSAT, told me.
Courtesy of MethaneSAT
It could also help the Environmental Protection Agency understand whether its new methane regulations are working. It could help with the development of new standards for natural gas being imported into Europe. At the very least, it will help oil and gas buyers differentiate between products associated with higher or lower methane intensities. It will also enable fossil fuel companies who measure their own methane emissions to compare their performance to regional averages.
MethaneSAT won’t be able to look at every source of methane emissions around the world. The project is limited by how much data it can send back to Earth, so it has to be strategic. Sargent said they are limiting data collection to 30 targets per day, and in the near term, those will mostly be oil and gas producing regions. They aim to map emissions from 80% of global oil and gas production in the first year. The outcome could be revolutionary.
“We can look at the entire sector with high precision and track those emissions, quantify them and track them over time. That’s a first for empirical data for any sector, for any greenhouse gas, full stop,” Hamburg told reporters on Friday.
But this still won’t be enough, said Thorpe of NASA. He wants to see the next generation of instruments start to look more closely at natural sources of emissions, like wetlands. “These types of emissions are really, really important and very poorly understood,” he 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.”
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A conversation with Mary King, a vice president handling venture strategy at Aligned Capital
Today’s conversation is with Mary King, a vice president handling venture strategy at Aligned Capital, which has invested in developers like Summit Ridge and Brightnight. I reached out to Mary as a part of the broader range of conversations I’ve had with industry professionals since it has become clear Republicans in Congress will be taking a chainsaw to the Inflation Reduction Act. I wanted to ask her about investment philosophies in this trying time and how the landscape for putting capital into renewable energy has shifted. But Mary’s quite open with her view: these technologies aren’t going anywhere.
The following conversation has been lightly edited and abridged for clarity.
How do you approach working in this field given all the macro uncertainties?
It’s a really fair question. One, macro uncertainties aside, when you look at the levelized cost of energy report Lazard releases it is clear that there are forms of clean energy that are by far the cheapest to deploy. There are all kinds of reasons to do decarbonizing projects that aren’t clean energy generation: storage, resiliency, energy efficiency – this is massively cost saving. Like, a lot of the methane industry [exists] because there’s value in not leaking methane. There’s all sorts of stuff you can do that you don’t need policy incentives for.
That said, the policy questions are unavoidable. You can’t really ignore them and I don’t want to say they don’t matter to the industry – they do. It’s just, my belief in this being an investable asset class and incredibly important from a humanity perspective is unwavering. That’s the perspective I’ve been taking. This maybe isn’t going to be the most fun market, investing in decarbonizing things, but the sense of purpose and the belief in the underlying drivers of the industry outweigh that.
With respect to clean energy development, and the investment class working in development, how have things changed since January and the introduction of these bills that would pare back the IRA?
Both investors and companies are worried. There’s a lot more political and policy engagement. We’re seeing a lot of firms and organizations getting involved. I think companies are really trying to find ways to structure around the incentives. Companies and developers, I think everybody is trying to – for lack of a better term – future-proof themselves against the worst eventuality.
One of the things I’ve been personally thinking about is that the way developers generally make money is, you have a financier that’s going to buy a project from them, and the financier is going to have a certain investment rate of return, or IRR. So ITC [investment tax credit] or no ITC, that IRR is going to be the same. And the developer captures the difference.
My guess – and I’m not incredibly confident yet – but I think the industry just focuses on being less ITC dependent. Finding the projects that are juicier regardless of the ITC.
The other thing is that as drafts come out for what we’re expecting to see, it’s gone from bad to terrible to a little bit better. We’ll see what else happens as we see other iterations.
How are you evaluating companies and projects differently today, compared to how you were maybe before it was clear the IRA would be targeted?
Let’s say that we’re looking at a project developer and they have a series of projects. Right now we’re thinking about a few things. First, what assets are these? It’s not all ITC and PTC. A lot of it is other credits. Going through and asking, how at risk are these credits? And then, once we know how at risk those credits are we apply it at a project level.
This also raises a question of whether you’re going to be able to find as many projects. Is there going to be as much demand if you’re not able to get to an IRR? Is the industry going to pay that?
What gives you optimism in this moment?
I’ll just look at the levelized cost of energy and looking at the unsubsidized tables say these are the projects that make sense and will still get built. Utility-scale solar? Really attractive. Some of these next-gen geothermal projects, I think those are going to be cost effective.
The other thing is that the cost of battery storage is just declining so rapidly and it’s continuing to decline. We are as a country expected to compare the current price of these technologies in perpetuity to the current price of oil and gas, which is challenging and where the technologies have not changed materially. So we’re not going to see the cost decline we’re going to see in renewables.
And more news around renewable energy conflicts.
1. Nantucket County, Massachusetts – The SouthCoast offshore wind project will be forced to abandon its existing power purchase agreements with Massachusetts and Rhode Island if the Trump administration’s wind permitting freeze continues, according to court filings submitted last week.
2. Tippacanoe County, Indiana – This county has now passed a full solar moratorium but is looking at grandfathering one large utility-scale project: RWE and Geenex’s Rainbow Trout solar farm.
3. Columbia County, Wisconsin – An Alliant wind farm named after this county is facing its own pushback as the developer begins the state permitting process and is seeking community buy-in through public info hearings.
4. Washington County, Arkansas – It turns out even mere exploration for a wind project out in this stretch of northwest Arkansas can get you in trouble with locals.
5. Wagoner County, Oklahoma – A large NextEra solar project has been blocked by county officials despite support from some Republican politicians in the Sooner state.
6. Skagit County, Washington – If you’re looking for a ray of developer sunshine on a cloudy day, look no further than this Washington State county that’s bucking opposition to a BESS facility.
7. Orange County, California – A progressive Democratic congressman is now opposing a large battery storage project in his district and talking about battery fire risks, the latest sign of a populist revolt in California against BESS facilities.
Permitting delays and missed deadlines are bedeviling solar developers and activist groups alike. What’s going on?
It’s no longer possible to say the Trump administration is moving solar projects along as one of the nation’s largest solar farms is being quietly delayed and even observers fighting the project aren’t sure why.
Months ago, it looked like Trump was going to start greenlighting large-scale solar with an emphasis out West. Agency spokespeople told me Trump’s 60-day pause on permitting solar projects had been lifted and then the Bureau of Land Management formally approved its first utility-scale project under this administration, Leeward Renewable Energy’s Elisabeth solar project in Arizona, and BLM also unveiled other solar projects it “reasonably” expected would be developed in the area surrounding Elisabeth.
But the biggest indicator of Trump’s thinking on solar out west was Esmeralda 7, a compilation of solar project proposals in western Nevada from NextEra, Invenergy, Arevia, ConnectGen, and other developers that would, if constructed, produce at least 6 gigawatts of power. My colleague Matthew Zeitlin was first to report that BLM officials updated the timetable for fully permitting the expansive project to say it would complete its environmental review by late April and be completely finished with the federal bureaucratic process by mid-July. BLM told Matthew that the final environmental impact statement – the official study completing the environmental review – would be published “in the coming days or week or so.”
More than two months later, it’s crickets from BLM on Esmeralda 7. BLM never released the study that its website as of today still says should’ve come out in late April. I asked BLM for comment on this and a spokesperson simply told me the agency “does not have any updates to share on this project at this time.”
This state of quiet stasis is not unique to Esmeralda; for example, Leeward has yet to receive a final environmental impact statement for its 700 mega-watt Copper Rays solar project in Nevada’s Pahrump Valley that BLM records state was to be published in early May. Earlier this month, BLM updated the project timeline for another Nevada solar project – EDF’s Bonanza – to say it would come out imminently, too, but nothing’s been released.
Delays happen in the federal government and timelines aren’t always met. But on its face, it is hard for stakeholders I speak with out in Nevada to take these months-long stutters as simply good faith bureaucratic hold-ups. And it’s even making work fighting solar for activists out in the desert much more confusing.
For Shaaron Netherton, executive director of the conservation group Friends of the Nevada Wilderness, these solar project permitting delays mean an uncertain future. Friends of the Nevada Wilderness is a volunteer group of ecology protection activists that is opposing Esmeralda 7 and filed its first lawsuit against Greenlink West, a transmission project that will connect the massive solar constellation to the energy grid. Netherton told me her group may sue against the approval of Esmeralda 7… but that the next phase of their battle against the project is a hazy unknown.
“It’s just kind of a black hole,” she told me of the Esmeralda 7 permitting process. “We will litigate Esmeralda 7 if we have to, and we were hoping that with this administration there would be a little bit of a pause. There may be. That’s still up in the air.”
I’d like to note that Netherton’s organization has different reasons for opposition than I normally write about in The Fight. Instead of concerns about property values or conspiracies about battery fires, her organization and a multitude of other desert ecosystem advocates are trying to avoid a future where large industries of any type harm or damage one of the nation’s most biodiverse and undeveloped areas.
This concern for nature has historically motivated environmental activism. But it’s also precisely the sort of advocacy that Trump officials have opposed tooth-and-nail, dating back to the president’s previous term, when advocates successfully opposed his rewrite of Endangered Species Act regulations. This reason – a motivation to hippie-punch, so to speak – is a reason why I hardly expect species protection to be enough of a concern to stop solar projects in their tracks under Trump, at least for now. There’s also the whole “energy dominance” thing, though Trump has been wishy-washy on adhering to that goal.
Patrick Donnelly, great basin director at the Center for Biological Diversity, agrees that this is a period of confusion but not necessarily an end to solar permitting on BLM land.
“[Solar] is moving a lot slower than it was six months ago, when it was coming at a breakneck pace,” said Patrick Donnelly of the Center for Biological Diversity. “How much of that is ideological versus 15-20% of the agencies taking early retirement and utter chaos inside the agencies? I’m not sure. But my feeling is it’s less ideological. I really don’t think Trump’s going to just start saying no to these energy projects.”