Security Cameras For The Planet
A new breed of satellites hunts for climate villains
Bad news—and good. The bad bit being that one of the worst methane leaks ever recorded was detected last year at a remote well in Kazakhstan, according to BBC Verify. An estimated 127,000 tonnes of the gas escaped when a blowout started a fire that raged for over six months. Methane, as the BBC points out, is much more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
No doubt embarrassed, Buzachi Neft, the company that owns the well, has denied that a "substantial amount" of methane leaked. But according to the US Environmental Protection Agency's Greenhouse Gas Equivalency Calculator, the environmental impact is likely to have been comparable to that of more than 717,000 petrol cars being driven for a year.
The good news is that we now have the technology to detect global methane emissions, which is going to become ever more important in efforts to tackle the climate emergency.
But how was the methane detected? The BBC explains that “when sunlight passes through a cloud of methane, it creates a unique fingerprint that some satellites are able to track. This particular methane leak was first investigated by the French geoanalytics firm Kayrros. Their analysis has now been verified by the Netherlands Institute for Space Research and the Polytechnic University of Valencia, in Spain.”
This is an area I first became interested in back in 1987 and 1988, when I wrote a short report for the World Resources Institute (WRI), with Jonathan Shopley, called The Shrinking Planet—exploring the potential applications of then-emerging forms of satellite remote sensing and information technologies. As part of the project, I visited places like NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenland, Maryland, and ESRI, in Redlands on the outskirts of Los Angeles.
Later, in 2016, on a learning journey for our Project Breakthrough work with the UN Global Compact, three of us visited Planet Labs in San Francisco. And one of the initiatives I have been tracking more recently has been MethaneSat. Last year, their technology was billed by New Yorker magazine as a “security camera for the planet.”
To coin a phrase, we will continue watching this space.
