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Methane more potent than carbon dioxide in short term

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Capping methane leaks is one of the quickest ways to

tackle

global warming

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EDF says will continue to track methane emissions

(Changes sourcing in first paragraph after operator announced

it, adds comment about future plans in paragraph 14)

By Valerie Volcovici

WASHINGTON, July 1 (Reuters) - An $88 million satellite

backed by billionaire Jeff Bezos that detected oil and gas

industry emissions of the powerful greenhouse gas methane has

been lost in space, the group that operates said on Tuesday.

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.

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.

Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, with 80 times the

warming power of carbon dioxide over a 20-year period.

Scientists say capping leaks from oil and gas wells and

equipment is therefore one of the fastest ways to start tackling

the problem of global warming.

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.

ENGINEERS INVESTIGATING

EDF reported the lost satellite to federal agencies

including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration,

Federal Communications 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.

The organization said it would continue to use its

resources, including aircraft with methane-detecting

spectrometers, to look for methane leaks.

It also said it was too early to say whether it would seek

to launch another satellite but believed MethaneSAT proved that

a highly sensitive instrument "could see total methane

emissions, even at low levels, over wide areas."

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.