The methane hunter: Meet the man who is tracking down emissions — from space

With more than 80 times the short-term warming power of carbon dioxide, methane is a significant climate threat. But finding and fixing methane leaks is no small feat and ground-based detection methods struggle to pinpoint this colourless, odourless gas. In this episode of Solve for X, host Manjula Selvarajah sits down with Stéphane Germain to discuss how his company’s fleet of microsatellites is transforming methane detection. By capturing data from orbit, this satellite technology offers new insights into methane sources, reshaping how we monitor and reduce emissions for a cleaner future.

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Stéphane Germain: Methane in nature doesn’t have a colour, doesn’t have a smell, so when it leaks, you don’t really know it’s leaking.

Narration: Finding something you can’t see or smell, it sounds like an impossible task. But Stéphane Germain has become an expert at doing just that — from space. His Montreal-based company, GHGSat, was the first commercial effort to use satellites to detect and map methane leaks.

Stéphane Germain: Of the tens of thousands or even millions of pieces of equipment that an oil and gas company might have across the world — or even just across an area like the Permian Basin in Texas — satellites can now go find that needle in a haystack.

Narration: Pinpointing exactly where methane emissions are leaking into the atmosphere could make a massive difference in the fight against climate change.

Stéphane Germain: You’re talking about oil and gas fields in the backwoods of a country; you’re talking about landfills, coal mines in Australia or Borneo or Brazil or the United States — these are places that are not — usually they’re kind of well shielded from the main road.

Narration: Today, the company has 12 microsatellites in orbit around the Earth, monitoring everything from landfills, refineries, to pipelines. Now, methane is responsible for more than a quarter of global warming, and for the past decade or so, levels in the atmosphere have only been increasing. When you look at it from the perspective of the climate, methane actually traps way more heat in the short term compared to carbon dioxide. It’s 80 times more potent, meaning methane does its damage quickly and then it’s gone. If we can cut these emissions now, it would have a near immediate cooling effect on the planet.

I’m Manjula Selvarajah and this is Solve for X: Innovations to Change the World, a series where we explore the latest ideas in tech and science.

But where do methane emissions come from? Agriculture is a major source, like cattle farming and rice paddies. Then there’s waste and landfills. Methane also comes from the drilling and processing of oil, gas and coal. It’s actually the main component of natural gas, and it can leak anywhere along that supply chain from your stove to the gas well. But finding these leaks early on is one thing; convincing industry players to trap gas from landfills or to take action by repairing pipelines is an even bigger challenge. On today’s episode, we talk to Stéphane Germain about what it takes to hunt methane. I reached him at his office in Montreal.

Stéphane Germain: Here we are.

Manjula Selvarajah: Hi, Stéphane. How are you?

Stéphane Germain: Hi, Manjula. Nice to meet you again.

Manjula Selvarajah: I’m curious — I want to throw an idea by you. When I travel — take, for example, when I go into Montreal — I see Montreal, I think in a very different way than you do. So I think of all of the places where I can eat; we go to that place that has a large orange.

Stéphane Germain: The Orange Julep! Yes.

Manjula Selvarajah: Yes. So given the work that you do, describe for me how you see the city and its geography?

Stéphane Germain: Well, when I’m looking at it from the lens of a satellite, it’s definitely different. So, I’m looking for the landfills, for the refineries, for any other sort of large infrastructure related to gas distribution, that’s the kind of stuff I’m looking for. So, some of my favourite spots are not necessarily the same favourite spots you’ve got. You know, there’s a landfill off the eastern part of the island, which is particularly gassy, and we’re in touch with that management and we’re having very good discussions. And so that’s the kind of stuff I look for.

Manjula Selvarajah: So how are you able to do these, detect these, methane emissions with satellites?

Stéphane Germain: So we use a well-known principle called spectroscopy. The idea is that every gas in the atmosphere absorbs light at very specific wavelengths. So it’s like every gas has its own spectral fingerprint. We then look for the pattern of gas on the ground, where the different concentrations are, and that usually — with some knowledge of the wind — allows us to tell the source of the emissions.

Manjula Selvarajah: So in some ways, you’re creating a methane map of the world.

Stéphane Germain: Absolutely. That was one of the premises of doing this 15 years ago: Can we build a map of the world, not just for scientific purposes of understanding how methane flows and how it can influence one region more than another, and then contribute to the overall global warming problem. But also to get right down to: Where’s this coming from? Who’s the owner of that site? And can we fix it? And really quickly the beauty of satellites for this is we help find those big ones fast, and we have enough data that we can help the operator then build a business case.

Manjula Selvarajah: I want to talk a little bit about some of the detection work that you do. Tell me about a time that you detected an important leak — where were you? What went through your mind as you realized the scope of it? Paint that picture for me of what happened that day.

Stéphane Germain: So, I’ll take one of the more recent ones. Unfortunately, they happen quite a bit.

Manjula Selvarajah: Do they?

Stéphane Germain: Oh yeah.

Manjula Selvarajah: How often?

Stéphane Germain: One that catches me by surprise and makes me go “ooh” — maybe once a month, once every two months — and I’ve been at this for a while now, right?

Manjula Selvarajah: OK.

Stéphane Germain: Oh yeah.

Manjula Selvarajah: Quite often.

Stéphane Germain: So we were actually working with a research team from the University of Leeds, and they were looking at a landfill, doing this through funding from the European Space Agency. And we didn’t see a whole lot, a whole lot from the landfill, but we accidentally found this emission from a pipeline. So we were shocked, you know again, we see industrial-size emissions. What worried us more is the emission was actually right next to a railway line. So this could have been a risk to human health. So remember now, methane is explosive in relatively low quantities. So we immediately contacted the operator. The operator, to their credit, immediately dispatched a team and discovered that yes, there was actually a corroded pipe that went under the railway. So they immediately got excavators going and right around the same time, the university people were getting super excited because this was one of the largest leaks ever found in the U.K. And all this took a matter of about two days.

Manjula Selvarajah: You’re telling me it took two days from when you noted it to when they responded?

Stéphane Germain: No — to when they fixed it.

Manjula Selvarajah: Oh, that’s incredible.

Stéphane Germain: It was very quick.

Manjula Selvarajah: So how did you receive that alert? Talk to me about — are you going about your day having, I don’t know, a cup of coffee and then an email pops up? Like, how does that happen?

Stéphane Germain: Well, in that case, we have alert systems in place already. Now, it came to my attention just because of the human health concern. My team was all over it. They jumped on communications with the operators and had people dispatched quickly. So I just sat and watched and I informed a few of my counterparts in the U.K. government that were working with us as well — not as regulators — but just more to see how the whole system unfolded. And it was never really a huge risk to human health, but it was still — because it had the potential to be — it got a lot of people interested quickly.

Narration: What Stéphane said brings up this idea of the speed of change. Now, I’ve looked at a lot of innovative technologies for the podcast about combating climate change. They’ve often been in the testing or pilot stage, meaning they’re still in this realm of potential. This is a rare example where a climate fix took place in the span of a few days.

Stéphane Germain: So that’s just one example by the way, because I mean, there’s plenty of others.

Manjula Selvarajah: Give me another. I’d love to hear another.

Stéphane Germain: So we were working with an oil and gas company in Central Asia. I’ll spare them the identification because it can get a little touchy for them. But they had agreed to be part of a trial to demonstrate how satellites can help them in their country. They’re in their training session, our satellite goes overhead. Within a few hours, we get a message over to the training sessions saying: Hey, you got three leaks, actually four, and you need to go take a look at these four and see what you can do about them. So literally they all jump in their pickup trucks, they head off. One was fixed immediately, two were partially fixed, and the fourth one they couldn’t do without some significant investment. But immediately just doing that was like taking 40,000 cars off the road for a year.

Manjula Selvarajah: Do you have a sense of what it was like in the room when you told them: we’ve actually got three or four right now?

Stéphane Germain: They were probably a little stunned to begin with, but then to their credit they jumped to it, right? That’s the whole point of the training session. Unfortunately, it’s not always positive. We sometimes reach out to some operators who just refuse to acknowledge that the emission is real. In particular in North America because by acknowledging that it’s real, they’re accepting an implied liability from a legal point of view to have to deal and repair the emission.

Manjula Selvarajah: Stéphane, what is it like for you to have that piece of data in your hand, that in a way says that something not good is happening, and then have to deal with a party that doesn’t really want to hear it or do anything about it?

Stéphane Germain: Well, let me talk on a global level. Globally, it’s extremely frustrating. Because only about 1 percent of what we detect every year currently is actioned for repair. And we’re working super hard to get more people to be aware and more people to act on it, but as you might imagine, it’s really complicated. So we have been working with several different space agencies in the last five years. Also with the UN, the UN environmental program, a group called the International Methane Emissions Observatory. We work with philanthropies who are willing to fund some of these projects in places that can’t fund themselves. And so all of these things are going on in parallel and we’re working to bump up those numbers to make significant reductions but even just 1 percent is about 6 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent mitigated in 2023. And that’s like taking well over a million cars off the road for a year. So we want to have a way bigger impact, we want to do a lot more and there’s certainly room to do a lot more.

Manjula Selvarajah: And to clarify again, did you mean 1 percent of what’s detected by your organization?

Stéphane Germain: That’s correct.

Manjula Selvarajah: That’s small.

Stéphane Germain: It is. Oh yeah, there’s lots of room for improvement.

Narration: In May of this year, Canada released an inventory of its greenhouse gas emissions. For the first time it included atmospheric measurements, making the estimate overall more reliable. Unfortunately, it also revealed that things have been worse than we thought. Oil and gas emissions have been dramatically underestimated.

Stéphane Germain: Canada’s and the United States and virtually any source that we’ve measured internationally is underreported. And the studies that support that, indicate that it’s typically anywhere from one and a half to two times underreported. The way it used to be done, and it’s still done primarily around the world, is you use what are called emissions factors. So emissions factors are basically a bunch of equations that say you use this input fuel, you have this much volume of stuff going through, you must have X amount of emissions depending on what process you have. Sometimes these emissions factors are like 30 years old. I’ll use the example from coal mining — from open pit coal mines. I think they’re over 40 years old. So, they used the best available science at the time, but it turns out that things have evolved a lot since then, processes have changed, so they’re just wrong. So, combine the wrong with the human bias toward making things as rosy as possible — it’s really not surprising that what we measure now directly is one and a half to two times higher than what’s self reported. And that’s what you’re seeing there.

Manjula Selvarajah: Now, there’s something that you hinted at earlier about “will” and I want to get into that. You know, I’m sure at a country level, fixing leaks and reducing methane takes an enormous amount of political will and diplomacy. You have to get countries to admit that there are leaks, first of all. How easy or difficult is that to do?

Stéphane Germain: [laughing] Well…

Manjula Selvarajah: I think I have my answer.

Stéphane Germain: Yeah, you really get quite the range. So again, let me put this in a positive light, because really you’ve got to stay optimistic in this job and look at the ways you can try to improve things as opposed to focusing on the negative. So there are lots of places in the world that see providing energy to their population as job number one. It’s absolutely critical to provide electricity to people so that so many benefits of development can be brought to those people. You can lift them out of poverty. You can help them make themselves richer so that they and their kids can live happier lives. And that’s all about electricity and energy in the first place. So to tell them ‘Oh, and by the way, could you also mind those emissions because that stuff is making my life in North America hotter?’ It’s kind of a secondary consideration. So getting those countries to pay more attention is happening, but it’s slow, and it takes a lot of people at way more senior levels than me to bring that attention to them. But they need our data to help make the argument because now it’s unequivocal, right? I can show them a picture and say ‘Look, this is what it looks like. We know you have these emissions. You’re not the worst in the world; there’s lots of other people who have the same challenges as you. Here’s how they fixed it.’ You share best practices. Some of this is free, right? It’s just maybe: separate your garbage more so the organics go over here and the inorganics go over there and then you treat the organic separately so they’d produce less methane — or put in some gas recovery systems and in that particular place and not in this place. So there’s all kinds of things you can do that are relatively low cost, relatively quick. Training people in oil and gas companies best practices for mitigating methane. But it’s about sharing that information, letting people know that it can be done relatively painlessly while they can still keep their priority of getting electricity to their population as their top priority.

Narration: I wanted to pick up on a thread Stéphane raised earlier. Western nations dictating how other countries should do their business is not always warmly received, especially considering the vast amount of greenhouse gas emissions the west is responsible for.

Stéphane Germain: One country in particular in Central Asia — and you have to keep in mind Central Asia is a place for oil and gas where a lot of the infrastructure is former Soviet-era type of oil and gas infrastructure. They are very much driven by delivering as much product to their own population and to export markets as possible because it’s a significant portion of their GDP. We started finding emissions all over Central Asia in about 2019 when our first satellite started detecting some of these things. And now as we’ve launched more and more satellites we’ve just seen more and more stuff. And the initial reaction was: ‘Don’t embarrass us publicly and internationally because everybody here will immediately disavow any kind of detection or methane emissions because we’ll see it as a fabrication of a western propaganda machine.’ The good news is almost everywhere now in Central Asia has signed up to what’s called the Global Methane Pledge, which is a priority that was brought about by the UN and the COP process — the Climate Change Conference process — every year. So we’re getting there, but it’s just really painful.

Narration: The Global Methane Pledge that Stéphane mentioned was launched by the EU and the United States at COP26. Since then, more than 150 countries have signed on. But what does this pledge even mean? Participating countries agree to cut methane emissions by 30 percent of 2020 levels before the end of this decade. It’s voluntary and non binding, and some of the most important players have yet to sign on, including China, India, and the Russian Federation. Looking ahead to COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, there’ll be a meeting to discuss progress on the pledge. Stéphane will have a seat at that table.

Stéphane Germain: I am cautiously optimistic that we’ll see some significant movement. In particular, there’s an effort going on between the US and China. They don’t see eye to eye on a lot of things, but one thing they do seem to see eye to eye on is climate. And they see methane as a priority within that. And if the two of them can come together for an announcement well ahead of COP29, I think that will help a lot.

Manjula Selvarajah: It’s interesting, this trait of diplomacy is something that CEOs and founders of big tech really learned to engage in. This is actually rare to hear of a Canadian startup, you know, that’s not at that stage yet, talk about really employing this trait and developing this skill.

Stéphane Germain: Oh, I’ve joked with senior people around the world about just how much I underestimated the geopolitics of what we do. It’s amazing that having a satellite that can see emissions anywhere in the world, by some places is considered to be spying. Because you could potentially embarrass them on an international scene. So, it very much involves diplomacy, it very much involves negotiations at a UN type of level or even bilateral type of discussions. It involves NGOs, who often are seen as less threatening than private operators that may have some ulterior motive. So it’s bringing all these different groups to bear. Sometimes a more scientific approach to it really works. Other times the science is mistrusted and a purely economic approach really works. But you know, we’ve done everything from embarrassing large countries at COP and losing millions of dollars a contract because of it, right through to embarrassing local companies who actually reacted very well and said, ‘OK, we now see the problem and we’re going to fix it.’ But then privately and behind the scenes just told us, ‘Hey, you’re a bunch of jerks.’ So we’ve concluded that throughout that whole process that where we think will have the greatest value and the greatest impact is by being partners to everyone out there. We will not shame anybody publicly. When we did it previously, it was inadvertent — it was honestly by mistake. We feel it’s more appropriate for us to use our data to work in partnership with these emitters with the countries that are responsible for these emissions to get to action because we think it’ll be more effective that way at the end of the day than by shouting at them from outside. Now, don’t get me wrong — I fully support and understand the need for activism. We feel that at the end of the day, having both approaches — activism on one side, working in partnership with operators on another side — will, one way or the other, get to the result we all want, which is reducing emissions.

Manjula Selvarajah: And given your really unique vantage point — you’re looking down from space, you’re detecting leaks that the rest of us can’t see, participating in global diplomatic things… I want to talk to you about the future. If you were to project five to 10 years ahead, and we play our cards right, what do you think the future looks like?

Stéphane Germain: So I’m an eternal optimist, so I’ll start there. I do believe that the efforts we and others now are deploying using satellites and other technologies are really starting to make a difference. I think emissions are going to continue to increase because we all need more energy, but I do think they’re going to slow — the increase is going to slow — and eventually we’re going to bend the curve so that we’re actually mitigating. I do think that 1.5 degrees is in the rear view mirror. I think that we’re heading much closer toward 2 degrees, and that concerns me every day. But that doesn’t mean we should be complacent and let things happen. We absolutely all need to keep monitoring, measuring, helping companies understand where their emissions are and helping fix them. So I do think we’ll get there. I think it’s going to be slower than we’d like, I think it’s going to get hotter than we’d like, but we all need to keep trying.

Narration: Progress on methane is a global effort, but it hinges on access to good data. The hope is that recent advances in satellite tech will go a long way toward solving our methane problem. Before I let Stéphane get back to the important work of hunting emissions, I wondered if he had a few more minutes for a lightning round.

Manjula Selvarajah: OK, I love this part. OK. It’s fun. It’s totally fun. There’s no wrong or right answers. Just whatever comes to your head. Choose your fighter: Methane Hunter, Emissions Detective, Fart Cop, or Carbon Spy?

Stéphane Germain: I think Fart Cop, just because it’s funny. I love the reaction I get when I tell people that.

Manjula Selvarajah: Oh, you’ve actually said that to people.

Stéphane Germain: No, not Fart Cop. But I talk about cow burps and cow farts and stuff. It always gets a laugh.

Manjula Selvarajah: Is there such a thing as too many satellites in space?

Stéphane Germain: Yes, definitely. So somebody once described this to me as: the desert at night is a big place, but all the cars are on one road. Right? So you can still get into accidents. It’s exactly the same thing in space. It’s huge, but a lot of satellites are on the same road. So we need to treat it responsibly. And we do need to be careful.

Manjula Selvarajah: It’s interesting because it’s almost an equivalent of how we see the planet. We think of it as vast. Everything’s vast; the deserts are vast, the mountains are, the tundra are vast. But I think at the end of the day, it’s still the small, sort of small, system.

Stéphane Germain: Yeah, and where we live every day is actually quite constrained within that huge expanse.

Manjula Selvarajah: Final question for you. Now I heard your satellites have special names, I believe. Could you name the ones up there right now?

Stéphane Germain: Oh boy. Okay. Well, Claire, Iris, Hugo, Luca, Diaco… I’m trying to go in order, which is why I’m pausing a little bit. So no, you’re not going to get me on a spot here, but — so they’re all named after the kids of our employees. And it’s a way to remind us every day why we do what we do.

Manjula Selvarajah: Stéphane, that is such a gift for a child. Oh my gosh. That is very, very cool. Stéphane, thank you.

Stéphane Germain: Thank you. It’s been fun.

 
Solve for X is brought to you by MaRS. This episode was produced by Ellen Payne Smith, and written by Jason McBride. Lara Tovi, Heather O’Brien and Sana Maqbool are the associate producers. Mack Swain composed the theme song and all the music in this episode. Gab Harpelle is our mix engineer. Kathryn Hayward is our executive producer. I’m your host, Manjula Selvarajah. Watch your feed for the next episode next month.

Solve for X is brought to you by MaRS, North America’s largest urban innovation hub and a registered charity. MaRS supports startups and accelerates the adoption of high-impact solutions to some of the world’s biggest challenges. For more information, visit marsdd.com. And we want to hear from you — drop us a line to share your ideas, questions and feedback. What innovations are you curious about? Email us at [email protected]

 
Illustration by Workhouse