I’ve always believed in the incredible potential of space technology. It has guided my education and career and shaped my dream of capitalizing on it through an entrepreneurial venture. That opportunity didn’t arise until the early 2010s however, when the governments of California and Québec instituted their cap and trade programs. Cap and trade programs place a tight ceiling on corporate emissions, and emitters who stay under that cap can then “sell” their leftover emissions allowance to those who exceeded it. 

Where I saw an opportunity was the logic behind them: if reducing emissions can save businesses money, there’s an incentive to measure and control them. However, unlike general air quality measurements, it’s technically difficult to pinpoint the source of an emission from the ground and quantify it, and costly, state-controlled satellites weren’t designed to trace emission sources to facilities like refineries. That’s where GHGSat came in—a way to combine my passion for space technology with a mission that could benefit our climate on Earth. 

With the advent of smartphone technology, which pioneered the practice of fitting complex hardware into small packages, we saw a way into the market. We believed we could develop smaller satellites that cost far less than those in orbit, but would be capable of accurately pinpointing the source of small emission leaks. More specifically, we wanted them to be able to  track methane, a significant contributor to climate change, one which traps heat much faster than carbon dioxide. Because methane is colourless, tasteless and odourless (unless mixed with other gases), finding emission leaks—whether they originate from a pipeline, landfill, coal mine, or other source—is like looking for a needle in a haystack. 

Today, twelve of our patented satellites orbit the Earth. Over the course of a day, they capture more than 13,000 images, which provide us with invaluable data on the source and size of methane leaks. Using that technology, we’ve built the largest collection of facility-level emissions data in the world. We license that data to governments and operators, and also monitor specific industrial sites with potential for methane leaks, like landfills and oil fields, at customer request. Our plan is to launch enough satellites to monitor every major industrial site in the world on a daily basis. 

There are both environmental and financial incentives for carbon-intensive industries to monitor and mitigate methane emissions. Financially, because methane is a key component of natural gas, it is also very valuable. Many companies build a series of smaller pipelines that can capture leaking methane from oil wells in order to sell it. For one client, an oil and gas operator working out of Texas’ Permian basin, we identified that one of their sites was releasing more methane than the company’s pipeline designs indicated it should be. After checking the data several times, our client sent engineers onsite and discovered that their designs didn’t align with what they had actually built. They were able to fix the problem and sell the methane they’d been failing to capture. 

Our technology also allows carbon-intensive industries to reduce their emissions, which overall benefits our planet. To manage leaking gas, oil & gas companies construct flares to burn it before it enters the atmosphere. This is actually better for the environment than releasing it, since burning it creates carbon dioxide which has a lower net impact. We identify flares that aren’t working properly, or “unlit” flares, and bring them to the attention of our clients. In one case, doing so led a client to fix a flare to the effect of taking a million cars off the road per year. Since GHGSAT’s founding, we’ve mitigated methane emissions equivalent to the annual output of nearly 3.5 million cars.

Thanks in part to our satellites, governments have implemented policies like the European Union’s methane policy because the technology required to execute it is now available. Our data helps those same governments observe and analyze the emissions in their jurisdictions, contributes to the UN’s International Methane Emissions Observatory, and is used by scientists to develop climate change and natural disaster models.

To date, we’ve raised USD$100 million in equity and grants, but the potential market for our business is much larger. We could serve global demand using approximately 100 microwave-sized satellites, at a relatively low and competitive cost. 

Momentum for methane mitigation is here to stay. Political will for climate change has fluctuated over the past decade, but all of our customers are with us on a voluntary basis. Our technology is critical in this transitional period for the energy sector, when we have to mitigate emissions to buy time to find other solutions, but many of our clients are also planning how to provide low-carbon energy offerings in the long-term.

Related: How Vida Gabriel Is Making Carbon-capture Technology Even Greener

Arguably, developing our technology was the easy part; encouraging human change is much harder. Mitigating emissions for even one landfill can mean managing relationships with official and unofficial entities at every level of government and society and we can’t do that alone. We can only manage what we understand, and GHGSat is at the forefront of facilitating those hard to implement changes, with data and insights that provide a foundation for action.

—As told to Marta Anielska