GHGSat, a Canadian emissions monitoring company, made history on Saturday with the launch of its Vanguard satellite designed to detect carbon dioxide emissions from individual facilities such as coal plants and steel mills – from space.
The satellite, Vanguard, was launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, according to GHGSat.
Utilizing space-age technology, GHGSat aims to hold polluting industries responsible for their impact on climate change. The company’s data is available for purchase by industrial emitters seeking to reduce their emissions, as well as by governments and scientists.
Vanguard will complement the existing network of satellites that are already identifying plumes of methane – a challenging-to-detect greenhouse gas leaking from small sources like pipelines, drill sites, and farms.
While carbon dioxide accounts for nearly 80% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, monitoring satellites currently do not focus on facility-level emissions, GHGSat noted.
The data collected by Vanguard will play a crucial role in validating and substantiating common practices for monitoring carbon dioxide emissions, said Stephane Germain, CEO of GHGSat.
“Having a direct measurement of the entire facility from a satellite will act as a validation, as the current methods often involve a mix of direct measurements and estimates,” Germain explained in an interview.
Existing satellite data has revealed that methane emissions are higher than estimated, leading Germain to suspect the same for carbon dioxide emissions.
GHGSat emphasized that the information gathered will bolster the accuracy of government emissions inventories, enhance scientific modeling, and improve the quality of corporate greenhouse gas reporting for investors.
(Reporting by Nichola Groom; Editing by Rod Nickel)
