Dr. Volts, writer and researcher David Roberts, provides climate change information that is useful and understandable. His March 22 contribution is What’s the deal with these methane satellites? Roberts interviewed Mark Brownstein of the global non-profit Environmental Defence Fund (EDF).

EDF recently launched a satellite that is measuring methane emissions. I suggest interested people should listen to the conversation between Roberts and Brownstein or read the PDF transcript. Excerpts follow:

• ROBERTS: MethaneSAT, a project long in development at the Environmental Defense Fund, is officially circling the planet. MethaneSAT has technical capabilities beyond existing satellites and represents another big step toward a future in which all greenhouse gas emissions are visible and traceable to their source, — a radical change from the situation we are in today, in which the majority of emissions are estimated, not measured directly…

• BROWNSTEIN: This came out of work that we started really back in 2010. If you remember back in those days: it was the early days of the fracking revolution in the United States. Industry was making all sorts of grand claims about how this was the best thing since sliced bread and this was going to be a winner for the climate. And of course, Bob Howarth and others were beginning to raise questions about the methane footprint associated with this gas.

• BROWNSTEIN: …back in 2011, we started with Dave Allen at the University of Texas, actually going out and doing field measurements in the US. That led to a whole campaign to not only look at methane emissions from oil and gas fields from well sites, but compressor stations and gathering and processing facilities. We even did work looking at methane emissions associated with city gas utility systems. And what we learned and what we published back in 2019 was the conclusion that, in fact, all of these engineering estimates were woefully underreporting emissions.

• That, in fact, emissions were 60% higher in reality than what was being reported… Every time we’ve gone out and done these kinds of field studies, they always come back with the same basic finding: that actual emissions are, in fact, much higher than what’s being reported. …we concluded that a global challenge required a global tool, and that’s where the idea of MethaneSAT was born.

• ROBERTS: I’m assuming that all the difficulty in development was in the detection and measuring technology.

• BROWNSTEIN: It’s a combination of things. I mean, first of all, the ability — 20 years ago, you couldn’t enter into a commercial contract to put a satellite into space… MethaneSAT is a cool piece of hardware, for sure, but it has really complex and sophisticated algorithms associated with it that allow us to interpret the data that we’re getting and be able to tie the emissions that we’re seeing back to specific geographies and be able to do that on a relatively instantaneous and automated basis.

• BROWNSTEIN: MethaneSAT really is the first time that we will have an instrument that is capable of giving us a relatively comprehensive picture of an actual concentration of greenhouse gas pollutants coming from a major industry. …we can give you really good information about the total amount of emissions coming from any production region in the world.

• ROBERTS: This is a cynical question, but why would an oil and gas company ever want this information to exist at all? Why — in what way does it benefit? Why wouldn’t they just want ignorance to last as long as possible? What are they getting out of knowing these specifics?

• BROWNSTEIN: Every molecule of methane that goes into the atmosphere is not only a problem for the climate, it’s a waste of an energy resource. …Okay, it’s a huge amount of energy resource, and of course, we and others want to hasten the transition away from gas dependence. But in the next couple of decades, as we work to do that, rather than drill new wells to meet that existing demand, let’s make more efficient use of the gas that’s already coming out of the ground. But that is being lost in venting and leaks and flaring.

• MethaneSAT by itself will give us good information on at least 80% to 85% of total oil and gas operations. And it’ll take us somewhere between a year and a year and a half to build up that inventory, if you will. But if all goes according to plan, sometime in 2025, we will basically have the ability now to track emissions for 80-85% of all oil and gas operations

• …One of the many things that we’ve learned over the course of the ten years of working on this issue is we’ve learned something about the importance of measuring data as opposed to estimating it.

• Methane from human activities drives close to a third of the warming that our planet is experiencing right now. To the extent that methane is beginning to emerge from permafrost, because permafrost is beginning to warm, probably the single most impactful thing that you can do to slow that process down is to eliminate the methane emissions from things like the oil and gas industry.

• MethaneSAT is fundamentally about creating accountability for emissions and having the ability to identify and reward good actors and identify and focus on those who are lagging behind. So, it is very much a tool about action…

• So campaigns that exclusively focus on super emitters are incredibly important because these things are big opportunities, very cost effective to address. But by only focusing on them, you’re dealing with only maybe half of the problem. So to get the kind of reductions that we need, you have to focus on the smaller sources [pipelines and distribution networks].

• ROBERTS: Will these satellites be useful at all in detecting leaks of natural gas in the sort of residential system, the pipelines and holding tanks and furnaces and stuff that people use in neighborhoods and stuff?

• BROWNSTEIN: Yeah, so, as you could probably imagine, the more diffuse you go, the more complicated it gets. I’m not aware that there’s any satellite technology that’s going to be the killer app for utility system leaks or for discerning the number of home heating systems that are doing incomplete combustion.

• ROBERTS: This notion that you can offer customers this sort of special grade of natural gas that’s very vaguely greener than some other form of natural gas. And my understanding of that is that it’s mostly kind of BS at this point.

• BROWNSTEIN: Right, we’ve talked a lot about holding industry accountable. This kind of data is also going to hold countries accountable. And in Europe, they also are in the process of finalizing a package of measures, one of which is to require anyone selling gas into the European Union to disclose the methane emissions associated with the gas that’s being sold.

• ROBERTS: So this question about how dirty is LNG, which is a very big fight right now, how many leaks are there in the pipelines? How much is involved in compression and all that?

• BROWNSTEIN: So customers, major customers, are beginning to ask this question, right, “What is the methane emission associated with the gas that I am purchasing?” And so, this data will help inform that. …as we start to get more and better actual data, the likelihood is that the emissions are going to appear to be going up, because frankly, we’re just getting a clearer picture.

• …we have the technology to actually measure industrial and even nonindustrial climate pollutants. And that technology is in the hands of civil society as much as it is in the hands of industry and government. So it’s democratized. And I do think that over time, it will revolutionize not only how we talk about these issues, but it’ll revolutionize the progress that we can make in addressing these problems.

• ROBERTS: …having a measured rather than estimated database of all the world’s greenhouse gas emissions and where they’re coming from and who’s responsible for them is really a fundamental change from what we have today. It’s really going to be a new world.

• BROWNSTEIN: You can’t manage what you don’t measure.

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