The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) has partnered with Google for MethaneSAT, a new satellite that will map, measure, and track methane globally.

MethaneSAT will launch in early May on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, Google said in a news release. The satellite will orbit Earth 15 times a day at an altitude of over 350 miles. It will measure methane levels in the top oil and gas regions in the world for regular analysis. The 200-plus kilometer satellite view path is large enough not only to quantify known sources, but also to discover and quantify previously unknown sources, EDF said.

MethaneSAT has the ability to monitor both high-emitting methane sources and small sources spread over a wide area, according to the release. It is designed to measure regions at intervals under seven days, regularly monitoring roughly 50 major regions accounting for more than 80 percent of global oil and gas production.

To calculate the amount of methane emitted in specific places and track those emissions over time, EDF developed algorithms powered by Google Cloud in collaboration with scientists at Harvard University’s School of Engineering and Applied Science and its Center for Astrophysics, and scientists at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.

Google said it is creating a global map of oil and gas infrastructure, with the goal of understanding which components contribute most to emissions. The company will use AI to identify oil and gas infrastructure, like oil storage containers, in the imagery, and combine it with EDF’s information about oil and gas infrastructure to locate where emissions are coming from.

Once the infrastructure map is complete, the MethaneSAT data can be overlayed and show where methane is coming from. “This information is incredibly valuable to anticipate and mitigate emissions in oil and gas infrastructure that is generally most susceptible to leaks”, Google said.

As it will focus on methane, MethaneSAT will be less expensive and quicker to launch than the multi-function satellites built by government space agencies, EDF noted. MethaneSAT will fill significant data gaps left by other satellite systems that are currently planned or recently deployed, enabling companies and countries to make better decisions and take action sooner.

To help researchers and organizations, the insights from the satellite will be available later this year on MethaneSAT’s website and accessible through Google Earth Engine, a planetary-scale environmental monitoring platform. By making MethaneSAT datasets available on Earth Engine, which has over 100,000 monthly active users, users will be able to detect trends and understand correlations between human activities and environmental impact, Google said. As an example, Earth Engine users can combine methane data with other datasets such as land cover, forests, water, ecosystems, and regional borders to track methane emissions in a given area over time.

With the energy transition underway globally, companies have been increasingly focusing on using satellite data to obtain better data on emissions. In November 2023, GHGSat Inc. launched the first orbital sensor able to pinpoint carbon dioxide emissions from individual industrial facilities.

The GHGSat C10, also known as Vanguard, was successfully launched by the company from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. The satellite builds on GHGSat’s experience with methane emissions to provide frequent, accurate and independent high-resolution carbon dioxide data from individual sites, and “will transform the way carbon dioxide emissions are monitored, reported and traded”, the company said in an earlier statement.

The high spatial resolution of the Vanguard allows it to focus on individual targets and accurately attribute emissions, something that current public carbon dioxide satellites are unable to do, GHGSat said.

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