The global oil and gas industry is the single largest source of avoidable methane emissions, emitting 80 million tons per year through venting, flaring, and unintentional losses (fugitive emissions). These Scope 1 emissions represent the fastest pathway for the gas industry to meet pressing climate targets.
At one time, satellite technology was the domain of governments and the military, requiring high cost earth stations and expensive handsets, and delivering such limited and costly bandwidth as to be only economic for select research institutions, arms of government, and very large private companies (including oil and gas).
That’s all about to change.
MethaneSat will be able to detect emissions at lower concentrations, from smaller sites, more frequently, and with greater accuracy than previous satellites.
And here’s the kicker. The data collected by MethaneSAT will be made publicly available, unlike many other data from satellite sources. Companies have already developed the algorithms to sift through the petabytes of survey data that such satellites produce (and like many algorithms, some will be in the public domain), so that the analysis will be swiftly available.
Here’s what’s about to happen.
We’re putting an unlimited amount of free, reliable satellite data about near real-time methane emissions, processed with unlimited amounts of low cost cloud computing, using share-ware algorithms for this purpose, into the hands of those with wildly varying interests in oil and gas.
What could possibly go wrong?
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