MethaneWatch

MethaneWatch is a software development with a strong environmental impact. This tool exploits satellite imagery to quantify human activities and their impacts on the environment by aggregating detections from various remote sensing instruments at different spatial resolutions.

The fight against global warming

The MethaneWatch project is at the heart of current concerns about global warming. Indeed, methane is considered a key element in leaving dependence on coal. It is therefore fundamental to ensure that its use is not also a significant source of greenhouse gases. Monitoring and controlling methane emissions is therefore essential to continuing the fight against global warming.

 

Satellite monitoring

The goal of this project is to develop an automatic global monitoring system on a daily basis using satellite imagery.

The wide variety of satellites that can be used to track methane emissions from space has led to look at different facets of this problem:

  • automatic detection, using  neural networks or conventional  methods,
  • quantification,
  •  the use of temporally sparse data but with good hyperspectral resolution (for example hyperspectral imaging with the PRISMA and EnMaP satellites),
  • the use of data with poor spectral resolution but a low revisit time, a good spatial resolution and a low acquisition cost  (for example the satellites of the Sentinel-2 constellation or even geostationary satellites like GOES or in the very near future Meteosat MTG).

A fruitful collaboration with an industrial partner

 

This work was carried out in collaboration with the French company Kayrros, the laboratory LSCE (Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Environnement), the Institute OPSL (Institut Pierre-Simon Laplace), with the help of CNES (Centre national d'études spatiales) and ESA (European space agency). This collaboration notably made it possible to develop the homonymous product MethaneWatch within the framework of the United Nations Environment Program, whose aim is to develop  the plateform Methane Alert and Response System (MARS).
This collaboration provided an opportunity to take part in blind evaluation experiments organised by Stanford University: the methods and algorithms developed during the project could thus be validated on many different sensors.

A representative example of the work carried out

Global Tracking and Quantification of Oil and
Gas Methane Emissions from Recurrent Sentinel-2 Imagery, Environ. Sci. Technol. 2022, 56, 14, 10517–10529 

The authors T. Ehret, A. De Truchis, M. Mazzolini, J.-M. Morel, A. d’Aspremont, T. Lauvaux, R. Duren, D. Cusworth, G. Facciolo have demonstrated that it is possible to monitor oil and gas infrastructure across the globe using recurrent Sentinel-2 recurrent imagery to detect and quantify more than 1,200 significant methane emissions.

In combination with emission estimates from airborne measurements and daily low-resolution satellite measurements, they demonstrated the robustness of the fit to a power law for all emission scales, from large-emitters to ultra-emitters. They conclude that the prevalence of ultra-emitters detected overall by Sentinel-5P is directly linked to occurrences of emissions that are below its detection threshold, and which correspond to the large emitters observed by Sentinel-2. This power law is also validated on a more local scale. This study is extremely important because it provides bounds for estimating global methane emissions from the oil and gas sector.

 

Publications

Industrial partners and software