Artist rendering of MethaneSat. Photo: Supplied / Environmental Defence Fund
The first results from a satellite partly funded by the New Zealand government show oil and gas fields overseas are leaking much more methane than their owners officially report.
The US-based Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) has released the first images from MethaneSAT, showing methane released by major fossil fuel-producing basins in the US, Turkmenistan and Venezuela.
EDF says early observations suggest methane emissions from North American and Central Asian production basins are significantly higher than currently reported, based on estimates made on the ground.
Two of those countries whose fields were looked at - Turkmenistan and the United States - are signatories to a global effort to slash methane emissions to the atmosphere by 30 percent this decade.
The findings from MethaneSAT may help explain why planet-heating methane emissions are soaring, even as countries grapple with expensive climate-change fuelled disasters.
In September, research by Stanford University and others found global emissions of methane were rising faster than ever, despite promises to cut emissions.
The trend "cannot continue if we are to maintain a habitable climate," the Stanford researchers wrote in an article accompanying the data release.
The data was from the Global Methane Budget, which found atmospheric concentrations of methane were more than 2.6 times higher than in pre-industrial times - the highest they've been in at least 800,000 years - and were rising in line with the most extreme trajectory used by the world's leading climate scientists to predict levels of global heating.
The current path would lead to global warming above 3 degrees Celsius by 2100, the researchers said.
The drivers were coal mining, oil and gas production and use, cattle and sheep farming, and decomposing food in landfills.
According to the Global Methane Budget, in 2020, 65 percent of global methane emissions were from human activities, with agriculture and waste contributing about two thirds and the remaining third coming from the fossil fuel industry.
However, because agriculture produces food, and its methane emissions are harder to stop than fossil fuel leaks, countries' efforts under the pledge typically aim to slash fossil fuel field emissions faster and deeper than agricultural emissions.
The main goal of MethaneSAT - and other methane-hunting space missions that are also underway - is to pressure big fossil fuel methane emitters to plug their leaks.
The Methane Pledge's 30 percent target by 2030 is a collective goal, so not every country has to meet it individually. That is how New Zealand was able to join despite having a 10 percent target for reducing methane from waste and agriculture. (Methane leaking from fossil fuel production is a small part of New Zealand's greenhouse gas profile).
Data delays
EDF owns the satellite mission, having raised funding from the Bezos Earth Fund, the Audacious Project (a nonprofit which operates out of the TED network), the New Zealand Government and others to help bankroll the mission.
New Zealand's $29 million contribution secured it the right to operate the mission control guiding the satellite's movements, which RocketLab will control initially before handing control to the University of Auckland.
The release of the first images from the satellite during the COP29 world climate summit this week is only a glimpse of what the full project is promising to deliver.
When MethaneSAT launched in March researchers working on the project hoped it would start supplying a steady stream of information from June 2024, which would be freely published for other scientists to use.
However, according to the latest estimate by EDF, the satellite won't provide data at full capacity until early 2025.
New Zealand's Government Space Agency and crown-owned science company NIWA (which has a contract to develop a way to use the satellite data to try to measure agricultural emissions) each said they didn't have any details about the reasons for delay.
The New Zealand organizations referred RNZ to EDF for answers.
EDF said it had been careful never to promise a concrete delivery date for the satellite's data.
"The process as a whole has taken longer than we hoped, but there were no notable or particular complications outside the realm of what would be anticipated," said a spokesperson.
"There is a lot of new technology on this mission, both hardware and software."
"For instance, commissioning our thrusters went slower than planned because they are a new model and the vendor was modifying their checkout procedure for us as we were going along," said the non-profit.
EDF said, as of October, "there are no issues with the satellite or its data collection performance".
It said the plan was to publish full analyses of emissions from major oil producing regions early next year.
The next step would be publishing the full stream of data to its public platform.
Next steps
New Zealand's Rocket Lab has been operating the satellite since June.
The Space Agency at the Ministry for Business, Innovation and Employment told RNZ that handover of the mission operations control centre from Rocket Lab to Auckland University was on track to happen before the end of the year.
MethaneSAT will circle the globe about 15 times a day.
Each day it collect and download readings from 30 segments of the planet each 200km by 200km, based on where the biggest suspected sources of emissions are.
Its main goal is covering 80 percent of the world's oil and gas production each year.
But it will also capture farming.
A test flight of the sensor, from a plane, spotted methane from some big US livestock operations.
Although New Zealand farms are less intensive than those feedlots, NIWA scientists working on the agricultural part of the project say they are confident they will see emissions from burping cows in Waikato, Canterbury and Taranaki.
They hope to use those measurements to develop and refine a reliable system for measuring cow and sheep burps from space, which would let scientists get a better handle on emissions from livestock farming countries without good quality government estimates.
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