Respond to prefers-color-scheme dark in app web views

Follow section front redirects in Spectrum

Enable NLP source in PCS for load testing

Switch off the News Alerts Survey Widget when we have enough responses

Poll to determine if new LUF updates are available

Allows the winning A/B test variant to be turned on without Spectrum deployment

Show infinite scrolling sections in Assembler MultiView

Show option for NLP article summaries in Action Bar

A general feature flag for Recipe Features that aren't yet released

Feature flag for media team features that aren't yet released

Use new Orca video player for preroll plugin in Spectrum

Show the snow tracker (instead of the heat tracker) on Spectrum

Trevor Williams’s escape act helps Nationals blank Rangers 

How to make the most of Passport DC’s free embassy tours

Dose of adversity gives Dylan Crews a new perspective in Class AA

Biden’s internet-for-all program needs Musk’s help

The tech billionaires who helped ban TikTok want to write AI rules for Trump

Microsoft’s “responsible AI” chief worries about the open web

That time football legend, rig-driving eligible bachelor Biden was arrested

World Press Freedom Day, 2024

Democrats hope move to reschedule marijuana will help them in November

Blinded in battle, these Ukrainian soldiers will never see their new babies 

Chinese EVs are good for the world. Biden says they’re bad for America. 

Middle East conflict live updates: Blinken urges Hamas to accept deal, says pier for aid close to completion

Miss Manners: Offering my bedroom to guests

Carolyn Hax: Will request for a postnup offend much younger wife?

Ask Amy: My wife’s sister confessed her feelings for me

Wait, what is Stephen A. Smith talking about? Find out with our quiz.

What makes a great Met Gala outfit

Police march toward Columbia University gate

Taxes are inevitable. Paying to prepare them doesn’t have to be.

A murder plot that cannot be ignored: India must come clean at last

How to confront antisemitism, deal with protests — and respect free speech

Adaptive adventures are making national parks more inclusive

Southwest passengers now get a $75 voucher for big flight disruptions

Man arrested at Yellowstone for allegedly kicking bison while drunk

Stephen A. Smith would like even more of your attention

Local sports networks go dark mid-game amid dispute with Comcast 

Cat climbed into Amazon return box, found alive 630 miles away

Brave Little Hunter is free: Baby orca escapes lagoon for open seas

I learned to heal my sadness by cradling dying chickens 

Trump and allies say Biden pays rent for ‘illegals’ in Michigan. Not true.

Eighty percent of Ukraine-Israel bill will be spent in U.S. or by U.S. military

Trump hush money trial live updates: Stormy Daniels’s lawyer testifies

Reporting on Earth’s changing climate and the search for solutions

See more coverage in your recommendations

Climate & environment

The Climate Coach newsletter

Climate alerts

Courtesy of MethaneSAT LLC

The global crackdown on methane emissions will get a boost from a watchdog satellite built to track and publicly reveal the biggest methane polluters in the oil and gas industry. The satellite launched March 4 on a SpaceX rocket and will begin transmitting data later this year.

The satellite, designed by scientists from the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) and Harvard University, will monitor areas that supply 80 percent of the world’s natural gas. Unlike other methane-tracking satellites, it will cover a vast territory while also gathering data detailed enough to spot the sources of emissions.

“Soon, there will be no place to hide,” said Ben Cahill, a climate expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a national security think tank. “There’s going to be a lot of public data on methane emissions, so companies will have very strong incentives to figure out the problem and fix it.”

Methane, a potent greenhouse gas released from farms, landfills and leaky fossil fuel equipment, accounts for <a href="https://www.iea.org/reports/global-methane-tracker-2022/methane-and-climate-change" target="_blank">nearly a third of global warming</a>. Cutting methane emissions is one of the <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02287-y" target="_blank">fastest ways to slow climate change</a>, according to climate scientists, because even though it <a href="https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/methane-emissions-are-driving-climate-change-heres-how-reduce-them" target="_blank">traps 80 times as much heat</a> in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, it <a href="https://www.iea.org/reports/global-methane-tracker-2022/methane-and-climate-change" target="_blank">dissipates after about 12 years</a>.

Matthew Brown

Most of the world’s oil and gas companies agreed to <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/12/02/methane-emissions-greenhouse-gas-oil-epa/" target=_blank>slash their methane emissions</a> by more than 80 percent by 2030 at last year’s COP28 climate conference, and policymakers are working to hold them to that promise. U.S. regulators <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/01/12/methane-fee-epa-climate/" target=_blank>proposed steep fines on methane emissions</a> in January and struck a deal with regulators in Europe, Japan, South Korea and Australia last year to<a href="https://www.ft.com/content/2cbb9457-61b7-4d6a-8d26-28c79f48777e" target=_blank> monitor fossil fuel companies’ methane emissions</a>.

But so far, it’s been hard to track companies’ progress. There are thousands of oil and gas facilities around the world with countless pieces of equipment that can leak or malfunction and release methane, which is odorless and invisible to the naked eye. Companies and regulators can measure some emissions by installing methane detectors or using planes or drones to fly sensors over a facility, but the data is incomplete and hard to compare between companies.

Now, a new generation of satellites, led by MethaneSAT, promises to give a more complete picture of the oil and gas industry’s global methane emissions.

“We’re on the verge of a methane data revolution ... in which satellites are having a very prominent role,” said Manfredi Caltagirone, who heads the United Nation’s International Methane Emissions Observatory. “MethaneSAT is exciting in particular ... because it’s expected to give us so much better data than what we have now.”

Courtesy of Google Inc

There are already a handful of public and private satellites that monitor methane emissions, but they either zoom in on small areas or take fuzzy, low-resolution surveys of the world. Currently, no satellite has a good enough view of global emissions to make meaningful comparisons between the methane coming from different oil and gas operations.

“Right now people can say a lot about what their emissions are and no one can prove them right or wrong,” said Steve Hamburg, the EDF’s chief scientist.

MethaneSAT is the first of several satellites that aim to make more detailed methane emissions data public. Another satellite, designed by NASA, a satellite maker called Planet and a greenhouse gas tracking nonprofit called Carbon Mapper, is set to <a href="https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasa-built-greenhouse-gas-detector-moves-closer-to-launch" target=_blank>launch this year</a>. Japan will send <a href="https://www.eoportal.org/satellite-missions/gosat-gw" target=_blank>another emissions-tracking satellite</a> into space this year, and the European Space Agency <a href="https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/Copernicus/Full_steam_ahead_for_carbon_dioxide_monitoring_mission" target=_blank>plans to launch two more</a> in 2026.

“We’re now zooming in from the continental scale to the scale of individual oil and gas basins, oil and gas fields and, in the case of Carbon Mapper, individual facilities,” said Riley Duren, a research scientist at the University of Arizona who heads Carbon Mapper.

That data can inform government efforts, such as the Environmental Protection Agency’s <a href="https://www.epa.gov/compliance/super-emitter" target=_blank>Super Emitter Program</a>, which allows third parties to report big methane plumes to federal regulators. Once the government has vetted the data for accuracy, companies must investigate the causes of reported leaks, share their findings with federal regulators and fix the problem if it violates the Clean Air Act.

“Industry is going to have to explain what happens on their sites ... and what are they doing to fix it,” said Carrie Jenks, who heads Harvard’s Environmental &amp; Energy Law Program. Discussions between advocates, regulators and companies could help lower emissions, she said.

The data can also play a role in the natural gas market, where customers are under pressure from regulators, shareholders or their own climate pledges to cut emissions and may choose to buy gas from companies or regions with better track records on plugging methane leaks.

“Acting on methane emissions will be a litmus test of credibility,” said Carlos Pascual, senior vice president for global energy at S&amp;P Global Commodity Insights. “You act on this knowledge, or you pay the cost — either of penalties, or of being increasingly excluded from the market.”

While satellite tracking tools are an important start to tackling methane emissions, they’re  not the entire solution, Caltagirone said. “They’re necessary but they’re not sufficient to fix the problem, and that is because data per se do not reduce emissions,” he said. Progress depends on companies doing something with the data.

Since methane doesn’t hang in the atmosphere for centuries, cutting its emissions can quickly pump the brakes on climate change.

The energy industry ranks as the<a href="https://www.iea.org/reports/methane-tracker-2021/methane-and-climate-change" target=_blank> second biggest source</a> of human-caused methane emissions after agriculture, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). Oil and gas companies release methane when they vent or flare gas to maintain pressure inside pipes or when fuel accidentally leaks out of faulty equipment. The IEA estimates that three-quarters of these emissions could be avoided, <a href="https://www.iea.org/reports/methane-tracker-2021/methane-and-climate-change" target=_blank>often for free</a>.

The American Petroleum Institute, an organization that represents U.S. oil and gas producers, says the industry is already working to cut methane emissions using data from private sensors, drones, planes and satellites.

“We welcome the proliferation of promising new technologies that allow our industry to detect methane emissions,” said Aaron Padilla, an American Petroleum Institute spokesman. But, he added, third-party data should be verified by government regulators, and the oil and gas industry will look to the EPA, not outside groups like the EDF, as the authority on tracking and regulating methane emissions.

Cahill, from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said plugging methane leaks is in companies’ best interest.

“It’s good for the environment and it’s good for your bottom line,” he said. “Relative to most climate problems, reducing oil and gas methane emissions is about the easiest solution we’re going to find,  so it’s really imperative for the industry to act fast.”

A previous version of this article misspelled the last name of Riley Duren, a research scientist at the University of Arizona who heads Carbon Mapper. The article has been corrected.

Northwestern University, BS in Journalism

Nicolás Rivero joined The Washington Post as a climate solutions reporter in 2023. Previously, he covered climate change for the Miami Herald and Quartz.

Nicolás Rivero

washpost

New satellites will make oil and gas companies’ methane emissions public

the-washington-post

HANDOUT on 8/26/22

An illustration of a satellite orbiting above Earth with the headline: A new watchdog satellite will sniff out methane emissions from space

The Washington Post

A new watchdog satellite will sniff out methane emissions from space

name

prism://prism.query/primary-site,/climate-environment/climate-solutions&limit=20

10 steps you can take to lower your carbon footprint

Climate Solutions

prism://prism.query/site-articles-only,/climate-environment&limit=20

Sign up for the Climate Coach newsletter and get advice for life on our changing planet, in your inbox every Tuesday.