Identifying methane emissions originating from the oil and gas industry is essential to mitigating climate change. Methane is a strong greenhouse gas with a relatively short lifetime in the atmosphere. However, up to now the capability to identify specific methane sources in oil and gas fields was limited. That is now changing as researchers have started to combine data from different satellites.

Over a four year period (2017-2020) the research team combined TROPOMI data – mapping  methane hot spots globally every day – with other satellites (Earth surface imagers). These high-resolution (~20m) Earth surface imagers have recently been shown to be able to detect very large methane plumes as well, and pinpoint the exact sources. This allowed the researchers to zoom in on the oil and gas fields on the west coast of Turkmenistan.

Flares

The team identified 29 individual methane (point) sources and determined how often these sources were active. By also looking at Landsat data the team found that a number of installations have been emitting methane over decades. Most of the sources are situated in oil fields; 24 of them are non-active flares.

The discovery of these point sources is an important step towards climate change mitigation, and proves that satellite instruments can play an important role in identifying and monitoring global methane emissions. The team will continue to monitor the methane leaks to see if action is taken to get the flares burning again.

Publication

For their research the team used satellite data from Sentinel 5 Precursor/TROPOMI, Sentinel 2, PRISMA, ZY1 AHSI and Landsat. The paper Satellites detect abatable super-emissions in one of the world's largest methane hotspot regions appears 1 February 2022 in Environmental Science & Technology. The authors are Itziar Irakulis-Loitxate, Luis Guanter, Joannes D. Maasakkers, Daniel Zavala-Araiza and Ilse Aben.