High above Earth, a cutting-edge satellite is zooming around the planet 15 times a day. It is hunting for leaks of methane — an invisible, super-polluting gas that is dramatically warming the planet.
Its measurements are precise enough to plot heatmaps of the biggest offenders, lighting up all the places they are venting the gas into the atmosphere at a staggering rate, unbeknownst to regulators, as the planet careens toward what scientists warn could be irreversible climate change impacts.
MethaneSAT’s early findings are that the oil and gas industry is belching the gas at a rate three to five times higher on average than what the Environmental Protection Agency has estimated, and way beyond the rate the industry itself agreed to in 2023.
The Permian Basin, one of the most productive oil and gas basins in the world, is leaking methane to the tune of 9 to 14.5 times the limit the industry agreed to — nearly 640,000 pounds per hour. The Appalachia Basin is leaking at four times the industry-set rate.
And in Utah’s Uinta Basin, the leak rate is an astonishing 45 times the industry-set limit. Although it’s leaking less overall than the Permian Basin, for example, it’s an older basin — with older, leaky equipment — that’s producing far less oil and gas.
“This is just very, very revealing — for the first time, to see this kind of observation,” said Ritesh Gautam, lead senior scientist on MethaneSAT. “The images we started to see were just extraordinary in terms of the overall precision of the data.”
Methane pollution has long been underestimated and not well-understood, and yet natural gas — which is up to 90% methane — is rising as the fossil fuel of choice to generate electricity. What scientists do know is that methane traps about 80 times as much heat as carbon dioxide in their first 20 years in the atmosphere.
“Understating real methane emission levels means underestimating their warming impact. Given the potency of methane, this is a real problem,” said Antoine Halff, co-founder and chief analyst at environmental monitoring group Kayrros. “If we don’t understand the scale of the problem, then our mitigation efforts won’t nearly be aggressive enough.”
The satellite’s early reports have been staggering. Over half a million wells that produce just 6 to 7% of US oil and gas generate roughly 50% of the industry’s methane pollution.
The leaks “might be hard to individually detect, but they all add up,” Gautam said. “In aggregate, there are so many of them – thousands and thousands across these basins.”
The satellite also gathered data from Turkmenistan and Venezuela, two other major oil-producing countries.
The problem is particularly severe in the South Caspian Basin in Turkmenistan, one of the planet’s largest methane hot spots. This region is pumping out methane at 1.5 times the rate of the Permian Basin, according to the data — more than 970,000 pounds per hour.
Scientists are confident in MethaneSAT’s readings because its data is in line with previous studies. Kayrros’s 2023 analysis of global methane pollution found Turkmenistan had the highest oil and gas methane intensity in the world, although emissions have been decreasing, said Halff.
“Turkmenistan is a very large oil and gas producer with aging infrastructure, some of which dates back to the Soviet era,” he told CNN. Dilapidated equipment tends to be leakier, and in parts of the Caspian Basin, gas is often treated as a waste product and vented or flared.
MethaneSAT also produced the first images of methane emissions from Venezuela, a South American petrostate with the world’s largest oil reserves. But because of Venezuela’s proximity to the tropics and frequent cloud cover, capturing its methane emissions has proved challenging.
“What (it’s) left with is methane observations in between the presence of clouds … revealing for the first time these big emission hot spots in in persistently cloudy regions like Venezuela,” Gautam said.
Tackling methane emissions has great potential to ease the pace of the climate crisis. Cutting methane pollution is the fastest way to curb the pace of the climate crisis, and the oil and gas industry is “the ‘low-hanging fruit’ of methane mitigation,” said Rob Jackson, chair of the Global Carbon Project and a climate professor at Stanford University.
But the climate crisis still needs an actual solution – which is to stop using fossil fuels altogether, Jackson said.
Plugging up leaks is “pretending to cut emissions,” Jackson said. “Companies make cutting emissions intensity sound like a cut in actual emissions. It isn’t, of course. It’s better than nothing, but it avoids the stronger need to cut fossil fuel use.”
