Can eyes in the sky help cut methane?

Last month, scientists working with data from Tropomi, a monitoring instrument onboard the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-5 satellite, published some startling findings. Writing in the journal Science, the team reported it had found about 1,800 instances of huge releases of methane (more than 25 tonnes an hour) into the atmosphere in 2019 and 2020. Two-thirds of these were from oil and gas facilities, with the leaks concentrated over the largest oil and gas basins across the world, as well as major transmission pipelines, the team said.

Launched in 2017, Tropomi has been a huge step forward for scientists researching methane, being the first instrument in space that can see plumes of methane emissions directly, said Lena Höglund-Isaksson, a