CO2 emissions from large industrial sites monitored from space

2023-11-13 14:30:57
This article was originally published in English

This is a first: a satellite launched by a Canadian company will be able to detect carbon emissions from sites such as coal-fired power plants from space.

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Canadian company GHGSat launched a satellite on Saturday intended to detect, for the first time from space, carbon dioxide emissions from individual installations, such as coal plants and steel mills.

The satellite, called Vanguard, was projected from the Vandenberg Space Station in California, GHGSat said.

Space technology is increasingly being used to push polluting industries to account for their contribution to climate change.

GHGSat data is available for sale to industrial transmitters who want to reduce their emissions, as well as to governments and scientists.

The “Vanguard” satellite will build on the growing network of satellites that already spot plumes of methane, an invisible greenhouse gas that is difficult to detect because it tends to escape from a multitude of small sources such as pipelines, drilling sites and agricultural operations.

Monitoring carbon dioxide emissions

Carbon dioxide accounts for nearly 80 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions from human activities and tends to enter the atmosphere from large industrial sources, such as power plants.

Satellites that monitor carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere are not currently focused on emissions created by industries, GHGSat said.

The data collected by “Vanguard” will help confirm current practices for monitoring and measuring carbon dioxide emissions, according to Stéphane Germain, CEO of GHGSat, headquartered in Montreal.

“Often we see a mix of direct measurements and estimates, so having a direct measurement of the entire facility from a satellite will serve as validation”says Stéphane Germain, during an interview.

Satellites have already shown that methane emissions are far higher than estimated. Stéphane Germain confides that he thought the same was true for carbon dioxide.

According to GHGSat, this information will help improve the accuracy of governments’ CO2 emissions inventories and scientific modeling, and improve the quality of corporate greenhouse gas reporting to investors.

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