Solving methane mysteries with satellite imagery

Solving methane mysteries with satellite imagery
blog.datadesk.eco

Banning routine flaring is a very good thing that needs to happen in more places. You _do_ still need to flare. There are lots of time periods where it will be required for safety reasons. But currently, it's common to simply flare methane that's produced instead of trying to use it. Methane can't be easily transported, and you need a pipeline to a populated area to use it unless you build expensive LNG facilities or slightly less expensive facilities to reinject it back into the subsurface. So remote oil fields are designed to flare off the methane that's produced alongside oil production, often for vast quantities of methane. That's "routine flaring". It's better (both from a safety perspective and a greenhouse gas perspective) than directly releasing it. However, it's far better to reinject it back into the reservoir (or another reservoir) or otherwise find some use for it than to flare it.

Routine flaring is used quite simply because regulators allow it. If you change the regulations, then companies will take the more expensive route or develop other resources. If you don't, then they're more or less legally required (read: shareholders _will_ have grounds to dismiss the CEO) to take the legal and much cheaper route of flaring methane that can't easily be sold. Can you really justify to shareholders that you're going to spend an extra several tens of billions USD to do something that isn't required and that your competitors aren't and that won't increase profits at all? The regulatory environment has to change for that to happen, but it's a patchwork and not some global thing. The EU has been leading there.

But detecting flares (even "hidden" ones) is _much_ easier than detecting methane leaks. Methane leaks are pretty damned insidious and hard to find. That's a big part of why they're so common. Hyperspectral imaging is _really_ damned cool, and while I'm certainly biased, the Tanager satellite they used there is really really neat.

>"If you enclose the flare, people don’t see it, so they don’t complain about it. But it also means it’s not visible from space by most of the methods used to track flare volumes.”

Sensirion: https://www.sensirion-connected.com/emissions-monitoring

Longpath Technologies: https://www.longpathtech.com