Measuring emissions from natural gas superemitters from space

Four countries have launched satellites which can measure concentrations of greenhouse gas emissions. Canada's GHGSat Inc is the first private company that can measure emissions from any location on earth. To date GHGSat's Clair satellite has measured emissions from 2,500 locations.  Among these are emissions from so-called superemitters in the natural gas industry in the U.S.

I have blogged extensively about methane emissions from the shale gas industry. There is increasing evidence that leakages from production wells, of which there are about half a million in the U.S., erodes the advantage that natural gas has over coal with respect to contributing to greenhouse gas warming. Studies suggest that a small number of wells, socalled superemitters, are responsible for more than half of the total volume of leaked methane gas in the United States.  This is an image of a heat map created from measurements made by GHGSat's Claire August 2018 over a site in Texas.  The heat map has been superimposed on imagery captured by ESA's Sentinel-1.