Agriculture and waste processing produce large amounts of methane, but the Google project will focus on methane emissions from oil and gas facilities. Companies that produce oil and gas regularly burn or emit methane. This new project is a collaboration between Google and the Environmental Defense Fund, a nonprofit global climate organization.
The data collected by the satellite will be processed by the tech giant's artificial intelligence tools and used to create a methane map designed to identify methane leaks in oil and gas infrastructure around the world.
However, the company said that even if it discovers a major breach, it does not specifically notify the companies that own the responsible infrastructure.
"Our job is to make information available," he said, adding that governments and regulators also have access to information and it is their job to force change. emissions. The EU has agreed to a series of proposals aimed at reducing this. This includes forcing oil and gas operators to repair leaks. In the coal sector, flaring will be banned in member states from 2025. Google's maps published on Earth Engine are not real-time; data is sent from satellites every few weeks.
In 2017, the European Space Agency launched a similar satellite instrument called Tropomi that maps the presence of trace gases such as methane in the atmosphere. This was a mission that would have required him at least seven years. That means it could end this year.
Carbon Mapper, using Tropomi data, published a report in 2022 showing that the largest methane plumes were observed in Turkmenistan, Russia, and the United States. However, due to cloud cover, the data did not include Canada or China. Google said it hopes its project will "bridge the gap between existing tools."Despite extensive tracking efforts, methane levels remain worryingly high.
NASA says the amount of gas has more than doubled in the past 200 years, and 60% of that is due to human activity. Livestock, especially cattle, account for the majority of this proportion. Because of the way cows digest their food, cow burps and farts contain methane.
In 2020, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency released a report stating that one cow can produce 154 to 264 pounds of methane gas per year. It is estimated that there are approximately 1.5 billion cattle raised for meat in the world.
"Satellites are perfect for finding the really big, bulk contributors to methane emissions," said Peter Thorne, professor of physical geography at Maynooth University in Ireland.
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