News Feeds | ecology.iww.org (2024)

Audubon Society - Tue, 03/26/2024 - 07:44

Categories: G3. Big Green

Resilience - Tue, 03/26/2024 - 07:37

Categories: B5. Resilience, Third Nature, and Transition

Resilience - Tue, 03/26/2024 - 07:36

Categories: B5. Resilience, Third Nature, and Transition

North American Windpower - Tue, 03/26/2024 - 07:29

Wärtsilä has signed a long-term guaranteed asset performance agreement with CSBC-DEME Wind Engineering (CDWE), a joint venture between CSBC Corp. and DEME Offshore, covering CDWE’s new 216-meter marine installation vessel (MIV).

The MIV, dubbed “Green Jade,” was designed and built in Taiwan and booked by Wärtsilä in Q1 of this year. The company says the lifecycle agreement it provides will increase the vessel’s uptime.

“From the very first discussions it was clear that availability, maintenance flexibility and reliability were essential for this project with CDWE during project execution,” says Henrik Wilhelms, Wärtsilä Marine’s director of agreement sales.

“This vessel holds a special flag administration and classification society exemption, permitting 7.5 years drydocking intervals. This is enabled with data, AI and close collaboration between us and the ship operator.”

The post Wartsila to Guarantee Operational Reliability of Wind Farm Installation Vessel appeared first on North American Windpower.

Categories:

Institute for Local Self-Reliance - Tue, 03/26/2024 - 07:10

Audubon Society - Tue, 03/26/2024 - 06:42

Categories: G3. Big Green

Utility Dive - Tue, 03/26/2024 - 06:36

Categories:

Mining.Com - Tue, 03/26/2024 - 06:34

Gold producer Mako Mining (TSXV: MKO) is expanding into South America with the proposed acquisition ofGoldsource Mines (TSXV: GXS) and its flagship asset, the Eagle Mountain gold project in Guyana.

An agreement was struck on Tuesday for Mako Mining to acquire Goldsource in an all-stock deal, with Goldsource shareholders receiving 0.22 of a Mako common stock for each share held. By company calculations, this consideration equates to an upfront premium of roughly 41% based on spot prices.

At presstime (9:30 a.m. ET), Mako’s shares traded down 1.1% at C$2.53 apiece for a market capitalization of C$166.5 million. Goldsource Mines was flat at C$0.395, with a market capitalization of C$23.6 million.

Upon completion, Mako will own approximately 84% of the combined company, which will continue to be listed as a Tier 1 mining issuer on the TSX Venture Exchange. Existing Goldsource shareholders will hold the remaining 16% interest.

Both parties anticipate the deal to be completed in the second quarter of 2024.

This acquisition, says Mako, creates a “clear path to over 100,000 ounces per year of gold production with a demonstrated record of fiscal discipline.”

It currently operates the high-grade San Albino gold mine in Nicaragua, which last year recovered 34,982 ounces of the metal, including a record 11,567ounces from the fourth quarter. The mine entered production in the second quarter of 2021.

The Eagle Mountain project adds another high-quality gold asset in a mining friendly jurisdiction to Mako’s portfolio.

AJanuary 2024 preliminary economic assessment outlined a potential 15-year mine operation, with a phased development plan and resources of 1.18 million oz. in the indicated category. The project has an estimated after-tax net present value (discounted at 5%) of $292 million and an internal rate of return of 57%.

“The scalability of Goldsource’s Eagle Mountain is a direct analogue to that of Mako’s San Albino mine,” Mako CEO Akiba Leisman said in a news release. “Both properties have district-scale potential, with the ability to unlock that potential through cash flow.”

He also noted that the teams at Mako and Goldsource have worked together as colleagues going back nearly two decades, which makes the integration seamless.

“This team has a solid track record and many decades of experience building mines, which is a unique offering for a junior gold producer and one that we believe is a great fit for our phased development plans at Eagle Mountain,” Goldsource executive chairmanEric Fier added.

To fund near-term activities at Eagle Mountain until the closing of transaction, Wexford, Mako’s largest shareholder, has provided Goldsource with a bridge loan of C$2 million.

Categories: J2. Fossil Fuel Industry

Global Tapestry of Alternatives - Tue, 03/26/2024 - 06:08

Categories: B5. Resilience, Third Nature, and Transition

Stay Grounded - Tue, 03/26/2024 - 06:05

This was the first webinar in a series offering space for dialogue, analysis and discussion of alternatives to the impacts of the aviation industry, organised by the Latin American and Caribbean regional network of Stay Grounded, “Permanecer en la Tierra”.

Quintana Roo, Mexico. ‘The Day of Reflection on Aviation and Airport Expansion’, coordinated by Permanecer en la Tierra, a regional network for Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), which is part of the Stay Grounded global network, began on 29 February 2024.

During the webinar, reflections began on important issues for Latin America and the Caribbean, related to aviation and its profound ecological, social and cultural impacts.

The first reflection topic was aviation and tourism and scenarios for Latin America and the Caribbean, which was presented by Luis Rodolfo Olivares Franco, member of the Seminar of Critical Urban Studies (SEUC) of Geography at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), Matilde Córdoba Azcárate, Associate Professor at the University of San Diego, California, and Daniela Subtil, coordinator of the Stay Grounded Global Network.

The ‘Reflection Talks’ presented academic analysis on the situation in the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, which has been affected by the tourism industry since 1974 with the creation of Cancun as a mass tourism development project.

One of Matilde Córdoba Azcárate’s reflections was the following: “Tourism development is a continuation of extractivist ways of operating, which are not new, but are new in their impacts on an ecological level and also on a socio-political level. This type of extractive tourism involves the dispossession of land, the enclosure of common spaces and resources, the commodification of ways of life, civilising and acculturation processes, of language, of vision, of ideology of kinship and gender, of ways of organising the home. It implies the silencing and alienation of other possible futures”.

You can watch the first Reflection Talks conversation on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyjrVGuhm1w

It is also available on Facebook: https://web.facebook.com/61555323617123/videos/1177458026576792

We invite you to participate in the upcoming sessions of the Reflection Talks which will cover themes that greatly impact the lives of Indigenous, urban, rural, and peasant people’s and for all those who inhabit the diverse and beautiful territory of Latin America and the Caribbean:

2. Territorial conflicts and airport expansion in Latin America and the Caribbean.
3. Militarisation and airport infrastructure: an analysis of geopolitics in Latin America and the Caribbean.
4. The Mayan Train and the Interoceanic Corridor: The territorial reordering of south-southeast Mexico and Central America.
5. Building alternatives to stay grounded from Latin America and the Caribbean

Register here to join: https://es.stay-grounded.org/permanecer-en-la-tierra-jornadas-reflexion/

Der Beitrag Webinar: Reflection Talks with the Latin American and Caribbean network erschien zuerst auf Stay Grounded.

Categories: G1. Progressive Green

Mining.Com - Tue, 03/26/2024 - 06:02

A recent paper in the journal Science Advances sheds new light on how concentrations of metals used in renewable energy technologies can be transported from deep within the earth’s interior mantle by low-temperature, carbon-rich melts.

The article details how an international team led by Isra Ezad, a postdoctoral research fellow at Australia’s Macquarie University, carried outhigh-pressureand high-temperature experiments creating small amounts of moltencarbonatematerial at conditions similar to those around 90 kilometres depth in the mantle, below the earth’s crust.

Their experiments showed carbonate melts can dissolve and carry a range of critical metals and compounds from surrounding rocks in the mantle—new information that may inform future metal prospecting.

“We knew that carbonate melts carriedrare earth elements, but this research goes further,” Ezad said in a media statement. “We show this molten rock containing carbon takes up sulphur in its oxidized form, while also dissolving precious and base metals—‘green’ metals of the future—extracted from the mantle.”

Most of the rock that lies deep in the planet’s crust and below in the mantle is silicate in composition, like the lava that comes out of volcanoes.

However, a fraction of a percent of these deep rocks contain small amounts of carbon and water that cause them to melt at lower temperatures than other portions of the mantle.

These carbonate melts effectively dissolve and transport base metals like nickel, copper and cobalt; precious metals, including gold and silver, and oxidized sulphur, distilling these metals into potential deposits.

“Our findings suggest carbonate melts enriched in sulphur may be more widespread than previously thought, and can play an important role in concentrating metal deposits,” Ezad said.

To run their experiments, the researchers used two natural mantle compositions: a mica pyroxenite from western Uganda and a fertile spinel lherzolite from Cameroon.

Ezad explained that thicker continental crust regions tend to form in older inland regions of continents, where they can act as a sponge, sucking up carbon and water.

“Carbon-sulphur melts appear to dissolve and concentrate these metals within discretemantleregions, moving them into shallower crustal depths, where dynamic chemical processes can lead to ore deposit formation,” the scientist pointed out.

In her view, this study indicates that tracking carbonate melts could give us a better understanding of large-scale metal redistribution and ore formation processes over earth’s history.

“As the world transitions away from fossil fuels to battery, wind and solar technologies, demand for these essential metals is skyrocketing, and it’s becoming harder to find reliable sources,” Ezad said. “These new data provide us with a mineral exploration space previously not considered for base and precious metals—deposits from carbonate melts.”

Categories: J2. Fossil Fuel Industry

Utility Dive - Tue, 03/26/2024 - 06:00

Categories:

Utility Dive - Tue, 03/26/2024 - 05:59

Categories:

Pembina Institute News - Tue, 03/26/2024 - 05:59

Categories:

Utility Dive - Tue, 03/26/2024 - 05:44

Categories:

Mining.Com - Tue, 03/26/2024 - 05:23

Australia’s OreCorp (ASX: ORR) is recommending that shareholders accept the off-market takeover offer from Perseus Mining (ASX, TSX: PRU) after a competing bid by Canadian rival Silvercorp Metals(TSX, NYSE: SVM) lapsed.

Perseus and Silvercorp have vied for months to the acquire the Africa-focused gold explorer, which last week saw Perseus raise its cash offer to A$0.575 a share. The figure, representing 4.5% increase over its previous bid of A$0.55, had been originallyturned downby OreCorp earlier this year.

Perseus also revealed at the time it had won the support of two OreCorp shareholders who between them owned more than 15% and extended the offer to April 19.

OreCorp had given Silvercorp five days to increase its bid, but this period has now expired.

As no other bid has since emerged, OreCorp is now encouraging shareholders to accept Perseus’ proposal.

“The OreCorp board now unanimously recommends that OreCorp shareholders accept the amended proposal once it is capable of acceptance, in the absence of a superior proposal,” it said in a statement.

OreCorp’s key project is the Nyanzaga Gold Project in northwest Tanzania and Perseus has been looking for additional gold assets in Africa to grow its portfolio.

Nyanzaga islocated near Barrick Gold’s (TSX: ABX; NYSE: GOLD) Bulyanhulu mine and AngloGold Ashanti’s (JSE: ANG) (NYSE:AU) Geita mine.

A 2022 definitive feasibility study gave the project an after-tax net present value of $618 million at a 5% discount rate and an internal rate of return of 25%.

Perseus operates three gold mines in Africa: Edikan in Ghana, and Sissingu and Yaour in Côte d’Ivoire.

Categories: J2. Fossil Fuel Industry

Protect Thacker Pass - Tue, 03/26/2024 - 05:00

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Thacker Pass Protectors File First-Ever “Biodiversity Necessity Defense” in Nevada CourtAlso pursuing “Climate Necessity Defense” and making allegations that mining company has violated their rights. Attorney: “They’re not criminals; they’re heroes.”

WINNEMUCCA, NV — In a first for the American legal system, the lawyers for six people sued by Lithium Nevada Corporation for protesting the Thacker Pass mine are arguing a ‘biodiversity necessity defense.’

The necessity defense is a legal argument used to justify breaking the law when a greater harm is being prevented; for example, breaking a car window to save an infant locked inside on a stifling hot day, or breaking down a door to help someone screaming inside a locked home. In these cases, trespassing is justified to save a life.

This week’s filing states that “Defendants possessed an actual belief that their acts of protest were necessary to prevent the present, continuing harms and evils of ecocide and irreversible climate change.”

“We’re in the midst of the 6th mass extinction of life on Earth, and it’s being caused by human activities like mining,” said attorney Terry Lodge, who is representing the protesters. “Our lives are made possible by biodiversity and ecosystems. Protecting our children from pollution and biodiversity collapse isn’t criminal, it’s heroic.”

Currently Earth is experiencing one of the most rapid and widespread extinction events in the planet’s 4-billion-year history.

Biologists report that habitat destruction, like the bulldozing of nearly 6,000 acres of biodiverse sagebrush steppe for the Thacker Pass mine, is the main cause of this “6th Mass Extinction.”

Permitting documents for the Thacker Pass mine show the project will harm or kill pronghorn antelope, golden eagles, mule deer, migratory birds, burrowing owls, bobcats, roughly a dozen bat species, various rare plants, and hundreds of other species.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is currently being sued by environmental groups in an attempt to secure protection for a rare snail species who lives in Thacker Pass and who are threatened with extinction.

“Our ancestors fought and died for the land at Peehee Mu’huh,” says Dean Barlese, an elder and spiritual leader from the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe who is one of the defendants in the case. “We’ve acted for the coming generations to protect Mother Earth.”

In their court filing earlier this week, Lodge and the other attorneys working on the case made several additional legal arguments, including invoking the doctrine ‘unclean hands,’ asserting that Lithium Nevada Corporation has “engaged in serious misconduct including violating the Defendants’ human rights, Defendants’ civil rights, misleading the public about the impacts of lithium mining and how lithium mining contributes to climate change and biodiversity collapse, and conducting the inherently dangerous and ecologically-destructive practice of surface mining at the Thacker Pass mine”.

They’re also arguing the “climate necessity defense,” reasoning that by attempting to stop a major mine that will produce significant greenhouse gas emissions, the protesters were acting to reduce emissions and stop a bigger harm: climate change.

According to permitting documents, the Thacker Pass lithium mine is expected to produce more than 150,000 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent per year, roughly equivalent to the emissions of a small city and amounting to 2.3 tons of carbon for every ton of lithium that will be produced.

This legal strategy has been used by many fossil fuel protesters around the world for roughly a decade (and has been successful in a few cases), but this is the first time the same argument has been applied to a ‘green technology’ minerals mining project.

“Lithium Nevada, a mining corporation benefiting from the violence used to conquer Native peoples, is trying to bully peaceful protestors opposing the destruction of that massacre site,” said Will Falk, an attorney and one of the defendants in the case.

“People need to understand that lithium mining companies—like coal or gold mining companies—use racist and violent tactics to intimidate opposition.”

“The Indian wars are continuing in 2023, right here,” Barlese says. “America and the corporations who control it should have finished off the ethnic genocide, because we’re still here. My great-great-grandfather fought for this land in the Snake War and we will continue to defend the sacred. Lithium Nevada is a greedy corporation telling green lies.”

Bethany Sam:
“Our people couldn’t return to Thacker Pass for fear of being killed in 1865, and now in 2023 we can’t return or we’ll be arrested. Meanwhile, bulldozers are digging our ancestors graves up. This is what Indigenous peoples continue to endure. That’s why I stood in prayer with our elders leading the way.”

Bhie-Cie Zahn-Nahtzu:
“Lithium Nevada is a greedy corporation on the wrong side of history when it comes to environmental racism and desecration of sacred sites. It’s ironic to me that I’m the trespasser because I want to see my ancestral land preserved.”

“It is truly outrageous that we live in a society where our Supreme Court has granted constitutional rights to resource extraction corporations, making their destructive activities fully legal and virtually immune from oversight by We the People. Even their right to sue us is a corporate personhood right,” said defendant Paul Cienfuegos, founding director of Community Rights US.

“Lithium mining for electric vehicles and batteries isn’t green, it’s greenwashing,” says Max Wilbert, co-founder of Protect Thacker Pass and author of the book Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It. “It’s not green, it’s greed. Global warming is a serious problem and we cannot continue burning fossil fuels, but destroying mountains for lithium is just as bad as destroying mountains for coal. You can’t blow up a mountain and call it green.”

Earlier this month, the judge presiding over the case dismissed an “unjust enrichment” charge filed against the protesters, but allowed five other charges to move forward. The case is expected to continue for months.

About the Case

The lawsuit against the protestors was filed in May 2023 following a month of non-violent protests on the site of the Thacker Pass lithium mine in northern Nevada. Thacker Pass is known as Peehee Mu’huh in Paiute, and is a sacred site to regional Native American tribes. It’s also habitat for threatened and endangered wildlife.

Analysts say the lawsuit is similar to what is called a “Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation,” or SLAPP suit, aimed at shutting down Constitutionally-protected free speech and protest. It aims to ban the water protectors from the area and force them to pay monetary damages.

On September 12th, 1865, federal soldiers murdered at least 31 Paiute men, women, and children in Thacker Pass during “The Snake War.”

This massacre and other culturally important factors have made the Thacker Pass mine extremely controversial in the Native American community. Dozens of tribes have spoken out against the project, and four — the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony, Summit Lake Paiute Tribe, Burns Paiute Tribe, and Winnemucca Indian Colony — battled in court to stop the Thacker Pass mine. The National Congress of American Indians has also passed several resolutions opposing the project.

But despite ongoing criticism, lawsuits, and lobbying from tribes as well as environmental groups, ranchers, the Nevada State Historic Preservation Society, and the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, both Lithium Nevada Corporation and the Bureau of Land Management have refused to stop construction or change any aspect of the Thacker Pass mine.

In February 2023, the Bureau of Land Management recognized Thacker Pass as eligible for the National Register of Historic Places as a “Traditional Cultural District,” or a landscape that’s very important to tribes. But the very day before, they issued Lithium Nevada’s final bond, allowing the Canadian multinational to begin full-scale mining operations.

###

Categories: B4. Radical Ecology

La Via Campesina : International Peasant Movement - Tue, 03/26/2024 - 04:47

Brasilia, March 19, 2024.

We, the social movements of the rural world, waters, and forests, articulated within La Via Campesina Brazil, gathered in Brasilia from March 17th to 19th, 2024, publicly express our total rejection of the European Union – Mercosur Agreement. The Agreement under discussion represents a setback for Brazil and the Mercosur countries in terms of socio-economic development, as well as a frontal attack on the sovereignty of our countries. There is nothing new in the current terms of the Agreement, which has already been rejected more than 20 years ago. The current text of the Agreement, resumed in 2019, represents the essence of Bolsonaro’s DNA with no commitment to the development of our country.

The Agreement assumes neo-colonial characteristics in its conception and threatens, in its terms, our peoples and territories, posing a danger for peasant agriculture, traditional communities, and delivering our common goods to the interests of international capital, thus consolidating the export-oriented nature of our economy, which is basically to continue exporting raw materials to meet the demands of European countries in exchange for industrialized products. Therefore, we want to publicly denounce to the Brazilian people the risks that the Agreement presents both for peasant family agriculture and for the Brazilian industry, if it is to be signed. We ask that President Lula listen to the clamor of the people of the rural world, waters, and forests and put an end to the ongoing negotiations and make room for the construction of a popular project for national development in Brazil.

The post Brazil: Declaration of La Via Campesina Brazil on the EU-Mercosur Agreement appeared first on La Via Campesina - EN.

Categories: A1. Favorites, A3. Agroecology

Mining.Com - Tue, 03/26/2024 - 03:41

Northern Star Resources (ASX: NST), the owner of Western Australia’s biggest open-pit gold mine, the Super Pit, is seeking approval for a significant expansion for the already massive operation.

The project would add seven years to the Super Pit productive life, keeping it open until 2034. The mine, formally named Fimiston Open pit, is one of the four assets that make up Northern Star’s Kalgoorlie Consolidated Gold Mines (KCGM) operations, about 600 km east of Perth.

The proposed expansion includes widening and deepening the current pit, as well as scaling up the Fimiston II tailings storage facility and building a new TSF (Fimiston III).

It also involves clearing of up to 1868 hectares (ha) of which 1,580 ha is native vegetation, the applicationto Western Australia’s environmental authority shows.

In total, Northern Star expects to increase the area of the development to 7,795 hectares, up from the currently approved 5,914 hectares, it said.

There has long been speculation about the fate of the Super Pit, but a few months after acquiring the asset in 2020, Northern Star provided a clear signal that was committed to continue mining until the mid-2030s.

The company, the top publicly traded gold producer in Australia, allocated last year A$1.5 billion ($982 million) to more than double processing capacity to about 27 million tonnes of ore per year by 2029 at its Kalgoorlie operations.

Soaring gold prices have sparked significant activity in the Australian bullion sector. Evolution Mining (ASX: EVN) in December agreed to buy an 80% stake in the Northparkes copper-gold mine in New South Wales from Chinese miner CMOC Group. That followed the high profile acquisition of Newcrest by gold giant Newmont (NYSE: NEM) for more than $15 billion.

Last month, Red 5 (ASX: RED) acquired Silver Lake Resources (ASX: SLR) to build a mid-tier gold producer valued at $1.5 billion, and Perseus Mining (ASX, TSX: PRU)is ready to take on OreCorp (ASX: ORR).

Categories: J2. Fossil Fuel Industry

Rocky Mountain Institute - Tue, 03/26/2024 - 03:00

We are in a race against time to clean up centuries of pollution in our atmosphere and rebalance our climate. While carbon dioxide rightly receives attention as the prime warming culprit, another greenhouse gas — methane — wreaks more havoc in a shorter timeframe than CO2.

Methane’s effect on our atmosphere cannot be overstated. If CO₂ pollution wraps one blanket around the earth, methane pollution is like wrapping the earth in over 80 blankets. The good news is that cutting methane emissions now, before it super-heats the planet, results in immediate climate and public health benefits.

But methane has proven a challenge to track consistently. It’s invisible, for one, as well as odorless, pressurized, and leaky. But we know where to spot it. Methane’s biggest human-caused sources are oil and gas, coal mines, waste facilities, and agricultural operations like large animal feedlots. These emissions can be persistent, like a landfill that spews methane for months on end, or highly intermittent, like a gas flare. Plus, emissions can be big and concentrated (like a super-emitter event) or less concentrated and diffused over a big geographic area. In short, they are highly complex and therefore really tough to track and quantify.

So, where to start? The first step is to better monitor these emitting events, and the facilities where they happen. Until recently, this tracking has been intermittent, with methane surveys mostly taking place on the ground with handheld devices. Other strategies, like aerial flyovers, have helped improve transparency but are not up to the task of monitoring the truly planetary scale of methane pollution and in prioritizing actions that can reduce emissions now.

Now, a new generation of nonprofit (NGO) satellite missions is rising to the challenge. With the launch of MethaneSAT in early March by the Environmental Defense Fund, the first by a non-governmental organization (NGO), there are now more than a dozen satellites scanning the Earth to identify key sources of methane and other climate pollutants.

And MethaneSAT is just the first of other NGO satellites to come. RMI is playing a leading role in this quest. Later this year, Carbon Mapper — an NGO spearheading the first-ever public, private, nonprofit coalition — is working with Planet Labs, a satellite developer, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to launch its first hyperspectral satellite which will detect high emissions point sources of methane (and CO2) acting like a zoom lens that can spot leaks down to a specific facility or piece of equipment with unprecedented precision. RMI is a member of the Carbon Mapper Coalition along with Planet, NASA Jet Propulsion Lab, California Air Resources Board, University of Arizona, Arizona State University, and philanthropic partners.

For global emissions, the wave of new sky-high NGO sensors means that we are closer than ever to getting a handle on the methane menace — and putting a stop to it.

Seeing the invisible

Methane is not visible to the human eye, so how can satellites see it? Fortunately, the technology to allow this is not a giant leap. In fact, it’s available in most college physics labs.

The key sensor, called a spectrometer, works a little like a camera. Point the camera at an area: It will show you an image. Point a spectrometer at an area: It shows the kinds of light that get absorbed by whatever the spectrometer is focused on.

To find methane, we’re looking for a signature pattern that only CH4 — the methane molecule — produces when absorbing sunlight. This pattern is only visible on the infrared spectrum at a particular wavelength.

An imaging spectrometer, which will measure the greenhouse gases methane and carbon dioxide, sits integrated at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in August, 2023. Source: Carbon Mapper

Scanning the whole planet

To monitor the scale of methane emitters across planet Earth, the spectrometer needs to go high — very high. After months of tests to prove its spaceworthiness — including subjecting it to intense vibrations to simulate a launch as well as the subzero temperatures it will encounter in the vacuum of space — the methane detector is mounted onto a satellite and rocketed into space.

Once anchored in orbit, satellites can begin to search for methane as they swing around the earth.

A satellite flight path demonstration (Source: CarbonMapper).

All the methane they can see

As the scale of the methane problem has become known, governments, nonprofits, and private entities have begun to fill the knowledge gap, all launching their own satellites with unique and complementary capabilities.

Some can see at a continent level (called area flux monitors), while others are able to pinpoint leaks right down to the source (these are called point source monitors). Some can view an area multiple times a day (essential to track variability in leaks), while others can check on a weekly or monthly basis.

Below is the current state of methane detection satellite operations, but the field is growing still. The European Space Agency is set to launch Sentinel-5 this year, with its CO2M satellite following in 2025; while MERLIN, a partnership between the French and German space agencies, is slated for a 2027 launch.

!function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",(function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var e=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var t in a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r=0;r

What’s new about nonprofit-led satellites — and what can we do with this data?

Nonprofit-led satellite programs like MethaneSAT and Carbon Mapper fill a crucial gap in our detection capabilities by virtue of their owners. Unlike national operators, no government can cut their funding, and unlike commercial operators, no bottom line need be met. The higher sensitivity of their sensors will also allow these new players to provide more actionable, timely, granular data than is currently on offer. MethaneSAT and Carbon Mapper satellites will also be complementary — with the former able to capture wide areas like basins, and the latter able to focus in on point sources.

Carbon Mapper and MethaneSAT also differ from the public and private options in their mission: these satellites are not for private use or scientific research, they are for climate action. They are open-source by design, helping feed methane measurements into a burgeoning field of independent emissions monitors—like RMI’s OCI+ platform and Climate TRACE — and allowing all stakeholders to benefit, and take action, based on the data returned from the satellites.

With all this information public, it will put pressure on emitters to clean up their acts. And with the US government’s methane fee on the horizon, oil and gas facilities have even more incentive to plug the leaks as quickly as possible.

With no time to lose as we reach crucial climate tipping points, these satellites are an essential tool protecting us and our communities from the aftermath of rising global temperatures. As more eyes take to the skies, methane will be invisible no more.

Read more:

Methane-Detecting Satellites 101: The Completeness Quotient

The post Methane Satellites 101: More Eyes Take to the Skies appeared first on RMI.

Categories: