Christine RO
Technological journalist
Helen Gebregiorgis
Portable devices can detect methane and other gases
In and around Washington DC, volunteers and activists have walked in the streets and houses to see how healthy the air is.
They are armed with industrial quality monitors who detect the presence of several gases. The devices look a bit like talkies-talkies.
But they are equipped with sensors that reveal the extent of methane, transforming this invisible gas into concrete numbers on a screen.
These figures can be disturbing. During a period of 25 hours, the district researchers found 13 leaks of methane external to concentrations exceeding the lower explosive limit. They also found methane leaks in the houses.
A key concern was health. Methane and other gases, including nitrogen oxide of gas stoves, are linked to higher risk of asthma.
Djamila Bah, a health worker and a tenant leader for the action of the community organization in Montgomery, reports that a in three children suffers from asthma in the houses tested by the organization.
“It is very heartbreaking and alarming when you do the tests, then you discover that some people live in this condition that they cannot change for the moment,” says Bah.
Methane could be a danger to human health, but it is also powerful greenhouse gases.
Although it has a much shorter lifespan in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide (CO2), methane is much better to trap heat and it represents about a quarter of the increase in global temperature from industrialization.
Methane emissions come from a diverse range of sectors. The main fuels are fossil fuels, waste and agriculture.
But methane is not always easy to notice.
It can be detected using hand gas sensors like those used by community researchers. It can also be visualized using infrared cameras because methane absorbs infrared light.
Monitoring can be on the ground, including devices mounted on vehicles, or air, including drone measurement. The combination of technologies is particularly useful.
“There is no perfect solution,” explains Andreea Calcan, head of program management at the International Observatory for Methane Programs, a United Nations initiative.
There are compromises between the cost of technologies and the extent of the analysis, which could extend to thousands of facilities.
Fortunately, she has seen an expand of affordable methane sensors in the last decade. There is therefore no reason to wait for methane surveillance, on any scale. And the world must approach both small leaks and emitting events, she says.
Carbon
The satellite hoator-1 is designed to identify large methane programs
On a larger scale, satellites are often good for identifying super-emiders: less frequent but massively emitting events, such as huge oil and gas leaks. Or they can detect smaller and more spread emitters that are much more common, such as livestock farms.
Current satellites are generally designed to monitor an issuer scale, explains Riley Duren, CEO of carbon, a non -profit organization that follows emissions.
He compares this to movie cameras. A telephoto lens offers a higher resolution, while a wide angle lens allows a larger field of vision.
With a new satellite, carbon focuses on high resolution, high sensitivity and rapid detection, to detect more precisely the super-emotable emissions. In August 2024, Carbon Mapper launched the Satellite Tanager-1, as well as the NASA jet propulsion laboratory and the Planet Labs land imagery company.
Carbon
A methane panache from a Texan oil field spotted in September 2024 by Tanager-1
The satellites have struggled to identify methane emissions in certain environments, such as poorly maintained oil wells in snowy areas with a lot of vegetation. Low light, high latitudes, mountains and offshore areas also have challenges.
Mr. DURN says that the high-resolution hoist-1 can meet some of these challenges, for example by mainly failing eggs by gaps in cloud cover or forest cover.
“In an oil and gas field, high resolution could make the difference between the isolation of methane emissions from an oil well head from an adjacent pipeline,” he said. This could help determine exactly who is responsible.
The carbon mapper began to publish data on emissions, relying on the observations of Hunter-1 in November.
It will take several years to develop the complete constellation of satellites, which will depend on funding.
Hanger-1 is not the only new satellite that emphasizes the provision of methane data. Methanesat, a project of the environmental defense fund and private and public partners, was also launched in 2024.
With the growing sophistication of all these satellite technologies, “what was previously insane is now visible”, explains Mr. Duren. “As a society, we always learn our real methane imprint.”
It is clear that better information is necessary on methane emissions. Certain energy companies have sought to escape methane detection using “closed combus” to obscure gas washing.
Translating knowledge in action is not always simple. Methane levels continue to increase, even if the available information also does.
For example, the methane alert and response system (March) uses satellite data to detect methane emissions Informing businesses and governments. The Mars team gathered a large amount of methane plume images, verified by humans, to form an automatic learning model to recognize these plumes.
In all the places that Mars constantly monitors, depending on their show history, the model checks a plume of methane every day. Analysts then examine all the alerts.
Because there are so many locations to watch, “it saves us a lot of time,” said Itziar Iraqi Loitxate, the Teldeteration lead for the International Methane Observatory, which is responsible for March.
During the two years that followed its launch, Mars sent more than 1,200 alerts for major methane leaks. Only 1% of these led to answers.
However, Ms. Iraqi remains optimistic. Some of these alerts have led to direct action such as repairs, including cases where emissions have ceased even if the oil and gas operator has not officially provided comments.
And communications improve all the time, says Ms. Iraqi. “I hope this 1%, we will see that it will increase a lot next year.”
At the community level, it was powerful for residents, such as those in the Washington DC region, to take atmospheric pollution readings themselves and use them to counter disinformation. “Now that we know better, we can do better,” says Joelle NOVEY with power and interconfessional light.
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