An $88 million satellite backed by billionaire Jeff Bezos that detected oil and gas industry’s emissions of the powerful greenhouse gas methane has been lost in space, the group that operates it told Reuters on Tuesday.
Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, with 80 times the warming power of carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. But many methane leaks go undetected, making the scale of pollution unclear.
MethaneSAT had been collecting emissions data and images from drilling sites, pipelines, and processing facilities around the world since March, but went off course around 10 days ago, the Environmental Defense Fund, which led the initiative, said.
Its last known location was over Svalbard in Norway and EDF said it did not expect it to be recovered as it had lost power.
“We’re seeing this as a setback, not a failure,” Amy Middleton, senior vice president at EDF, told Reuters. “We’ve made so much progress and so much has been learned that if we hadn’t taken this risk, we wouldn’t have any of these learnings.”
The launch of MethaneSAT in March 2024 was a milestone in a years-long campaign by EDF to hold accountable the more than 120 countries that in 2021 pledged to curb their methane emissions.
A groundbreaking satellite named MethaneSAT has been launched into space with the goal of tracking global methane emissions. Scientists hope the technology will help hold oil and gas companies accountable in the fight against climate change.
It also sought to help enforce a further promise from 50 oil and gas companies made at the Dubai COP28 climate summit in December 2023 to eliminate methane and routine gas flaring.
Capping methane leaks a fast way to tackle climate change, say scientists
Given how potent methane is, scientists say capping leaks from oil and gas wells and equipment is one of the fastest ways to start tackling the problem of global warming.
A new McGill University study suggests that methane leaking from Canada’s abandoned oil and gas wells is almost seven times higher than previously thought, and residents living near them are calling on the government to take urgent action.
While MethaneSAT was not the only project to publish satellite data on methane emissions, its backers said it provided more detail on emissions sources and it partnered with Google to to create a publicly-available global map of emissions.
EDF reported the lost satellite to federal agencies including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Securities and Exchange Commission and the U.S. Space Force on Tuesday, it said.
Building and launching the satellite cost $88 million, according to the EDF. The organization had received a $100 million grant from the Bezos Earth Fund in 2020 and got other major financial support from Arnold Ventures, the Robertson Foundation and the TED Audacious Project and EDF donors. The project was also partnered with the New Zealand Space Agency.
EDF said it had insurance to cover the loss and its engineers were investigating what had happened.
It said it would continue to use its resources, including aircraft with methane-detecting spectrometers, to look for methane leaks.
Despite the efforts to increase transparency on emissions, methane “super-emitters” have rarely taken action when alerted that they are leaking methane, the United Nations said in a report last year.
The pressure on them to do has decreased as the United States under President Donald Trump’s second administration has effectively ended a U.S. program to collect greenhouse gas data from major polluters and rescinded Biden-era rules aimed at curbing methane.