The Hub Talks: Carbon Mapper – Global distributions of super-emitting methane point sources as detected by satellites

Name: The Hub Talks: Carbon Mapper – Global distributions of super-emitting methane point sources as detected by satellites
Start: 2025-09-25T15:00:00+02:00
End: 2025-09-25T16:00:00+02:00
Location: ESRIN Science Hub

September 25 @ 3:00 pm – 4:00 pm CEST

Speaker: Daniel Cusworth is the Science Director for Carbon Mapper. Carbon Mapper’s mission is to drive greenhouse gas emission reductions by making methane and carbon dioxide data accessible and actionable. Daniel oversees algorithm development, validation, analysis, and applications of airborne and satellite greenhouse gas datasets. He was formerly a Data Scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a Research Scientist at University of Arizona and worked on quantification of anthropogenic carbon dioxide and methane emissions from regional to facility scales. He received his B.S. in Applied Math/Atmospheric Sciences at UCLA and Ph.D. in Atmospheric Chemistry at Harvard University.

Abstract: Super-emitting (>100 kg/h) methane sources likely contribute significantly to total emissions across several oil&gas basins, but the robust quantification and characterisation of these sources remains uncertain in absence of routine, transparent, and robust measurements. Solving this quantification gap is particularly important given international regulations and initiatives to require low methane intensities across the oil&gas supply chain by country and operator. The Tanager-1 satellite (launched August 2024) has shown capability of detection and quantification of the vast majority of methane super-emitters given adequate observing conditions and spatiotemporal coverage. Here we show Carbon Mapper’s progress in mapping super-emitter distributions and quantifying super-emitter intensities through intensive tasking of the Tanager-1 satellite of the majority of oil and gas infrastructure across key oil&gas producing countries. With 30-m spatial resolution of Tanager-1, we attribute each detection to facility and equipment type, allowing for better understanding of drivers of intensities and how those drivers vary across basins. Significant distributions of super-emitters are routinely detected in Tanager-1 across austere environments (e.g., high latitude, snow-covered), allowing for increased transparency of emission sources in regions that have been typically under-observed. Building a more complete global picture of super-emitters with attribution to infrastructure will aid in constructing mitigation roadmaps for lower-intensity energy.