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Communications United States Science

California To Hunt Greenhouse Gas Leaks and Superemitters With Monitoring Satellites (sciencemag.org) 101

California and its partners are set to launch by 2023 two satellites to spot and monitor plumes of planet-warming carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane. "If all goes right, dozens more could follow," reports Science Magazine. From the report: The $100 million Carbon Mapper project, announced today and financed by private philanthropists including Michael Bloomberg, will advance efforts to track concentrated emissions of greenhouse gases, which rise from fossil fuel power plants, leaky pipelines, and abandoned wells. Previous satellites have lacked the resolution and focus to monitor point sources rigorously. [...] The satellites will be built and managed by Planet, a California company that already operates a constellation of Earth-imaging satellites. The spacecraft will rely on "hyperspectral" imaging spectrometers developed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Rather than gathering light in just a few discrete wavelength channels, like the human eye, these spectrometers capture reflected sunlight and subdivide it into more than 400 wavelength channels across the visible and into the infrared. The intensity of light across these channels can be tied to specific chemistries and reflect the abundances of certain gases in the air molecules below.

The satellites won't just measure gases in the air; they will also detect chemical signatures on the ground. By measuring the intensity of green chlorophyll or detecting the signatures for excess salts or fungus, for example, researchers will be able to evaluate the health of crops and forests. They can prospect for minerals in remote regions. They can map and identify different coral and algae species, and they can track dust and soot. Even snow and ice pops out in these sensors, says Robert Green, a remote-sensing scientist at JPL. "Snow is one of the most colorful materials on Earth if you look beyond visible light."

The first two Carbon Mapper satellites will each be roughly the size of a washing machine, weighing up to 200 kilograms. They will provide imagery with a resolution of 30 meters but won't offer global coverage at first. Instead, they will target regions known to host superemitters, like power plants, oil and gas drilling, or livestock operations. The regions will be revisited every few weeks to start. All emission data, calculated from the plume intensity and length, will be made publicly available -- in the hopes that governments and businesses will do more to staunch leaks and tamp down discharges. [...] Should Carbon Mapper's first two satellites prove successful, Planet envisions building a commercial constellation of similar satellites that would revisit every spot on the planet once a day, and selling those data to regulators and companies.

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California To Hunt Greenhouse Gas Leaks and Superemitters With Monitoring Satellites

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  • by ulatekh ( 775985 ) on Thursday April 15, 2021 @10:08PM (#61279150) Homepage Journal
    Hopefully my favorite taco shop survives this project.
  • Propaganda (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ChrisMaple ( 607946 ) on Thursday April 15, 2021 @10:12PM (#61279156)
    Calling Micheal Bloomberg a philanthropist is a stretch. He's doing this as a way to attack his enemies.
    • If his enemies are creating problems for the rest of us, what's the problem?

      • Re:Propaganda (Score:5, Insightful)

        by saloomy ( 2817221 ) on Thursday April 15, 2021 @10:42PM (#61279210)
        It is great that he is involved. A big whale to sue for defamation and invasion of privacy. The problem is his enemies are generally good people who maybe in this case happen to emit CO2 emissions. Sometimes that happens when you do things like deliver milk to stores or produce life saving treatments, or run a large mill to make cribs for babies. Not all CO2 emitters are Ebineeser Scrooge out to rob the the air from your lungs for the sake of a quick buck. Our modern civilization was built on CO2 emitting energy, and it will take time to get off of it. I think we should, I think we should focus. I installed solar panels on my home. I have power walls to store sunlight for use at night. I drive an electric car (Tesla). I dont demonize other for not though. If everyone tried to do this at once, the cost of solar panels would sky rocket. There is only so much capacity for green energy production. There are supply and demand factors involved in the cost of green energy. If you want to upset the delicate good state we have now where the cost of fossil fuels falls back below the cost of renewable energy, shame a bunch of people into a buying frenzy, making solutions like mine out of reach for the middle class. You wont win them over when the prices go out of control because no one can get enough panels.
        • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

          by huckda ( 398277 )

          When California see's the CO2 map and realizes their entire central valley, LA and San Fran are THE hottest spots in the nation...
          will they actually DO anything about it? laughable....

          • by Uberbah ( 647458 )

            LA and San Fran are THE hottest spots in the nation..

            Durwut? Have you ever been to San Francisco? Get on the BART in the east bay when it's 90 degrees, get off in 'Frisco and the temp can be 30-40 degrees colder. Shows like Monk and Warrior that are set there are obviously filmed somewhere else, as the always bright and sunny days you see on TV are unicorns in the actual city.

          • by Gabest ( 852807 )

            Sometimes I check the CO2 map on earth.nullschool.net (great map btw). The worst emmiters are NYC, Germany and around Beijing.

        • Our modern civilization was built on CO2 emitting energy, and it will take time to get off of it.

          But we want to be hysterical about something. The solution can't be as simple as letting progress take it's course, we must force people to do our bidding!

        • So let's just cut all the direct and indirect subsidies for the fossil fuel sector, and let the cost of gasoline and other fossil fuels reflect real market costs. Right now those subsidies are (conservatively) around $5.2 trillion annually. I'll give you the link on that. It's Forbes Magazine, not Greenpeace or Al Gore.

          So are you on-side with that, or are you in favour of continuing with a distorted market that gives CO2 emitters an unfair advantage?

          https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesellsmoor/2019/06/15/ [forbes.com]

  • Will they (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Tulsa_Time ( 2430696 )

    Point them at the 50 new Chinese Coal power plants ?

    • Not if they want to continue selling their crap in China. That will be a benefit to those who do this. It will only help to make US domestic production more expensive and less competitive. The Chinese have lost ground to catch up for since the 2016-2020 sanction fiasco. They will support those who help them achieve these goals.
    • Re:Will they (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 15, 2021 @10:54PM (#61279240)

      How about solving problems within your power to solve? You know even if other problems do exist in the world.

      Or hey, as long as other people are being shitty we might as well be just as shitty if not shittier, right?

    • Yes. (Score:4, Informative)

      by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Friday April 16, 2021 @01:05AM (#61279372)

      Will they [p]oint them at the 50 new Chinese Coal power plants ?

      Yes, they planning to have an entire satellite constellation in Low Earth Orbit so that it will survey the entire planet in rapid intervals. If you look at their timeline, currently they are utilizing airborne surveys, the first demo satellite is slated to launch mid-2023 and the satellite constellation is slated for 2024.

      I'm not sure why you would think any nation would (or even could) be exempted.

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        The "50 new plants" claim is misleading. Most are replacing older plants, often multiple older plants, with new ones that are cleaner and integrate better into a renewable-heavy grid.

        China plans to be carbon neutral by 2060. That is an ambitious goal but not impossible. It means most of these plants won't be around for all that long, really just stop-gap measures to help the transition to renewable energy happen. Of course we need to keep an eye on what China actually does but so far they have been exceedin

    • look at the difference between the population of US and China - and then pull your head out?

    • And if they look at China - what about $AnybodyButMe?

  • where jackbooted thugs raid your house in the middle of the night and haul you off to the gulag because the satellite showed your house emitting too much carbon.
  • Blue Origin rockets are shaking in their boots.

  • This is a bunch of politicians spending other people's money on a project that does nothing to lower CO2 emissions, but it will certainly give them something to put in a press release.

    If Californian politicians were serious about global warming then they'd look at what technologies exist today and look towards implementing the most effective solutions.

    When it comes to the biggest sources of CO2 the top two are electricity generation and transportation. Those two make up more than half of the CO2 emissions

    • If California was serious about CO2 emissions then they'd be building nuclear power plants.

      Nuclear power is completely batshit, a thousand holes in your head insanity. Insane costs, construction times, risk, and creating a toxic waste problem that will easily last millions of years. Utterly unjustifiable. You can roll out wind and solar in a fraction of the time for a fraction of the cost, without needing 20 mile evacuation zones or building concrete bunkers that will need to be maintained for thousands o

      • by sfcat ( 872532 ) on Friday April 16, 2021 @03:38AM (#61279584)

        Nuclear power is completely batshit, a thousand holes in your head insanity. Insane costs, construction times, risk, and creating a toxic waste problem that will easily last millions of years. Utterly unjustifiable. You can roll out wind and solar in a fraction of the time for a fraction of the cost, without needing 20 mile evacuation zones or building concrete bunkers that will need to be maintained for thousands of generations.

        With such a well researched and lucid argument how can we disagree. None of the things you said are true. Nuclear has the lowest risk and most of the problems with it are caused by the lawsuits and interference from politicians and activists. Its the only scalable source of carbon neutral energy we have (and likely will have in any of our lifetimes).

        More brain worms. Natural gas just adds to the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, and fracking is just adding another environmental disaster on top.

        Well don't you worry at all then. Now that CA is shutting down its 2nd and last nuclear plant, we'll be using even more natural gas than we were already. Its most of our electricity already and will be more than 2/3 of the watts generated in the state in 2025 when Diablo shuts down. Oh, and I'm sure all the fracking we've been doing in CA isn't releasing too much methane and they have accounted for it in their carbon accounting that claims (questionably) that natural gas is cleaner than other fossil fuels.

        • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          Nuclear power isn't insanely expensive?

          Where on Earth is nuclear power proving to be cheaper than renewables?

        • FTFY
          Its (he means nuclear here) the only scalable source of carbon neutral energy we have (and likely will have in any of our lifetimes).
          And his sarcastic comment was at the wrong place:
          With such a well researched and lucid argument how can we disagree.

          Now your post makes more sense.

        • by Uberbah ( 647458 )

          With such a well researched and lucid argument how can we disagree.

          Your sarcasm is noted, but facts don't care about your nuke fanboy feelings.

          All of the things you said are indisputably true.

          Fixed.

          Nuclear has the lowest risk

          Repeating that lie doesn't make it true. Neither wind nor solar farms have 20 mile evacuation zones. But this claim is just comical after two major disasters (Chernobyl and Fukushima) and TEPCO has announced they are going to just dump radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean. And that

      • ... toxic waste ... easily last millions of years.

        Either it's very dangerous, or it lasts millions of years. These are mutually exclusive. Also, there are technical solutions to those technical problems. Give this one a try to get some information that may be interesting to you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] in Dutch with subtitles in various languages, from the makers of "America first, Netherlands second". The pie chart of global energy production is especially damning to wind and solar.

        • by Uberbah ( 647458 )

          Either it's very dangerous, or it lasts millions of years. These are mutually exclusive.

          How do you figure? The risks of meltdowns are very dangerous, as proven by Chernobyl and Fukushima. And the concentrated toxic waste will be a hazard long after the materials are no longer radioactive - just ask all the Iraqi kids born today with severe birth defects as a result from all the depleted uranium munitions used by Bush.

          Give this one a try to get some information that may be interesting to you

          Already watched a

          • Fukushima had no meltdown, and there was perhaps one death, not entirely proven but accepted for the count, related to the nuclear reactor incident. The tsunami killed 20 thousand people, so that was the true drama. You still didn't explain the danger of the waste being terribly dangerous for millions of years, which I countered. You just started with a red herring about meltdown. Are you uninformed, trolling, or just not very smart?
      • Nuclear isn't "batshit" when it's deployed in a proper and limited role. In fact it will be a necessity to retain some of it for base load, unless you want to retain fossil fuel plants for that purpose. Nuclear can be spun up or down on demand as renewable output fluctuates. Spun down it's not generating much waste, but having it there ready to go makes sure the grid won't shut down when it gets cloudy.

        Most all of the problems with nuclear can be eliminated or mitigated by: Don't build shitty 1970s reactors

        • by Uberbah ( 647458 )

          In fact it will be a necessity to retain some of it for base load, unless you want to retain fossil fuel plants for that purpose.

          Except: all the baseload FUD thrown at wind and solar applies more to nuclear power. Far more. Because while the wind doesn't stop blowing and the sun doesn't stop shining for months or even a year [upi.com] at a time, nuclear power plants do. [trib.com] Which means you need to either build a spare $20 billion water heater to back up one of the others on your grid when it goes down, and/or build a gia [wikipedia.org]

      • Nuclear power is completely batshit

        Make sure you tell that to all your friends. I want people to talk about nuclear power. I got you to comment. The more people claim it is a bad idea the more people will look to find out why. Then the magic happens. That's when people do their own research and find out this has all been a lie. 50 years of lies on how nuclear power is not safe, too expensive, etc., etc. Those lies persisted because at the beginning of this we didn't have a history of nuclear power safety, and now we do. Concerns of F

        • by Uberbah ( 647458 )

          The more people claim it is a bad idea the more people will look to find out why. Then the magic happens. That's when people do their own research and find out this has all been a lie. 50 years of lies on how nuclear power is not safe, too expensive, etc., etc. Those lies persisted because at the beginning of this we didn't have a history of nuclear power safety, and now we do. Concerns of Fukushima and Chernobyl do not reflect on nuclear power safety in the USA because... those were not in the USA. Three M

          • 50 years ago the USA was not building a dozen nuclear power reactors every decade, we were building that many every year. That's going to happen again because solar power has been failing to live up to is promises, those 50 year old nuclear power reactors will have to close soon, and the anti-nuclear politicians that have been in federal government all this time will have to make a choice.

            The federal government has three choices. First, build more natural gas plants. This is affordable right now but if t

    • by jwhyche ( 6192 ) on Friday April 16, 2021 @05:43AM (#61279714) Homepage

      If California was serious about reducing CO2 emissions then they'd build nuclear power plants, and not allow the federal government to stop them.

      I'm pro nuclear but I have to ask about the wisdom of building a nuclear power plant in a earthquake prone area. I think California would do better with well thought out solar solution, than nuclear.

      • California has been trying to replace nuclear power with solar power for decades. What's stopping them?

        The answer is that the technology does not exist to do so. It's quite likely it never will because solar power is intermittent, dilute, and therefore expensive.

        I have to wonder about the wisdom of repeating the same behavior over and over expecting a different result. California knows they can build nuclear power plants that can hold up to earthquakes. What they don't know how to build is solar power c

        • by jwhyche ( 6192 )

          That is old school thinking. In the past two years there has been some major breakthroughs in solar cell research.

          https://oilprice.com/Alternati... [oilprice.com]

          In that article they are quoting efficiency of up to 66% are coming. If that pans out, and with a efficient storage system, solar isn't just practical, it's probable.

          • Old school thinking is comparing yesterday's nuclear to tomorrow's solar, a typical tactic of the solar power shills.

            Grid scale electrical storage will not make solar power any more viable than it already is. What it will do is allow advanced third generation nuclear power, an existing and already viable technology, to load follow. That will mean that nuclear power can replace the inefficient and expensive natural gas turbines that are common backup for solar power. Once there's efficient storage on the

    • Nuclear power is too costly and has too many regulations. You'll never see another planet built in your lifetime. Want to see a great example?

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

      The plant was just starting to generate test power and it was shut down. Residents are still paying a surcharge on their bills for its cost. Meanwhile the sun is delivering free energy daily and the costs are dropping constantly. Only a fool would look at the sun and say no thank you.

      • That's one of nearly 450 civil nuclear power reactors in the world. Is that representative of the rest of the reactors in the world? No. Far from it.

        Along with these hundreds of civil nuclear power plants there's been hundreds of military nuclear power plants.

        You say that there are too many regulations? Is that a problem we cannot solve? I'd say it's a problem that is easily solved. All it takes is some politicians willing to tackle that problem. It looks like that is happening now. Why now? Why is

    • If the goal was to spend money on PR, there's a bunch of easier ways to do that. Carbon credits seem to be the go-to solution, or they could take a bunch of unskilled workers off the unemployment rolls and have them plant trees.

      Secondly, this will have a huge impact. Industrial emissions are only 2 to 6% [epa.gov] lower than what comes from transportation or electrical generation, so they are no less of an issue. Identifying industrial-scale polluters who either don't know or don't care they're breaking the rules wil

      • I thought wind and solar power was cheaper than coal and natural gas. If that is so then what is there to gain in cheating on CO2 emissions? Are you saying that wind and solar power are not in fact cheaper than coal and natural gas? Are you claiming that industrial CO2 emissions would come from people that would willingly spend money on CO2 emissions instead of keeping that money for a profit?

        This is still a stupid idea. If California wanted to make sure the industrial sector wasn't producing CO2 then t

        • You still seem to be confusing electricity generation with industrial emissions. These are different things. If your plant is emitting carbon because it's the reaction product of a synthesis step, you can never get rid of that with a solar cell. It requires changing your industrial process, or capturing and canning the carbon before it vents to the atmosphere. This costs money.

          I'm not completely sure what "willingly spend money on CO2 emissions instead of keeping that money for a profit" means, but if you w

          • You still seem to be confusing electricity generation with industrial emissions.

            Perhaps. You seem to be confusing monitoring industrial CO2 emissions with a solution to those emissions.

            Monitoring the CO2 isn't going to prevent it. California may try to tax it but all that will do is drive that industry to another location. If California was serious about industrial CO2 emissions then they'd help in finding alternative processes to these CO2 emitting processes.

            These CO2 monitoring satellites will do nothing to lower CO2 emissions. What would lower CO2 emissions is switching electric

            • I never confused monitoring with enforcing, I recognized that you need monitoring to enforce. I'm sure California isn't doing all they could, so I won't argue in their defense as it regards nuclear power or any other areas they're neglecting.

              Government funding for converting industrial processes is great, there should be more of that. That still doesn't address for example, leakages, which are real, look at the long list of "competent" companies that have blown up wells and crashed tankers, not to mention a

              • I never confused monitoring with enforcing, I recognized that you need monitoring to enforce.

                Does this monitoring need to be done by satellite? As I pointed out earlier California can locate the CO2 emitters without satellites. The major contributors are large immobile power plants and factories. They know where to find them without a satellite.

                That still doesn't address for example, leakages, which are real, look at the long list of "competent" companies that have blown up wells and crashed tankers, not to mention a thousand less explodey leaks you never hear about in the news.

                How does a satellite help in this monitoring? They know where these things are and the government of California doesn't need to know where the leaks are to transition away from these greenhouse gas emitting power plants and factories. This is again a pr

  • DISCLAIMER: I live in California, have all my life.

    So, when my state identifies these gross CO2 polluters, what will they do?
    If they actually target them to get them to clean up their output and actually make that happen, then great, I'm all for it.
    If they're just going to levy fines against them and not make them actually do anything abou it, then I question the whole thing as potentially just another way to make money for the State.
    • If they're just going to levy fines against them and not make them actually do anything abou it, then I question the whole thing as potentially just another way to make money for the State.

      Except that that the very first line of the article header says "financed by private philanthropists"

  • So we throw money away on a problem we cannot solve or even come close to solving. Why are we not throwing that money at the homeless crisis in California? Is the homeless crisis also a problem California is powerless to solve? Or is it an ego thing for some idiot California politicians?

    Not that the questions when answered would change anything. I'd just like to know, being a curious soul.
    {o.o}

  • When California has over 200 fossil methane ('natural gas') plants and has even brought a couple of less efficient gas plants back online due to the frequent brownouts, this doesn't feel like it should be a priority at all.

    Even better is that soon the last nuclear plant in California (Diablo Canyon) will be shuttered, which will remove another 1 GW of low-carbon power, to be compensated for by more gas.

    What's California's plan for kicking the fossil fuel habit? So far there seems to be none, as the stat
  • The cost of throwing something up into space is way more expensive than say using existing prop plane to fly around with gas detection sensors

    https://kairosaerospace.com/ [kairosaerospace.com]

    Kairos Aerospace is already performing this task.

    Like can we spend money on places that need it, like healthcare, cure for cancer? Not just reinventing the wheel just because we can? I mean shoot, Something like Kairos' approach could be used to attach sensors to solar powered drones as an example.

    • The aircraft approach is great, but doesn't provide what this study is aiming for. Super-emitters contribute a huge amount to methane emissions but are hard to catch because they're spread out and sometimes sporadic. Figuring out ways to easily identify them is a major effort right now (I work in this field). Even a plane doesn't have the spatial coverage to catch a superemitter unless it's just luckily within a few miles of it. If it does find a large methane concentration in the atmosphere, then it needs

  • "The $100 million Carbon Mapper project"
    Okay, let's replace that with the $100 million green energy solar salt tower, hydro, wave, wind turbine, and solar panel rollout project. Now which do you think would be more effective at reducing greenhouse gases? Here, let me give you the discount version. Go to Google maps and type in "power plants" and you'll get a very similar map as to what the satellite will give out.
  • Which is stupid (Score:4, Insightful)

    by wakeboarder ( 2695839 ) on Friday April 16, 2021 @09:43AM (#61280154)

    Because if you really wanted to cut back on CO2, you ban crypto mining which is using about half as much power as the entire state of california. And all but a small fraction of that computation is wasted.

    Estimate of crypto mining: 120TWh
    https://techcrunch.com/2021/03... [techcrunch.com]

    California power consumption: 260TWh
    https://www.energy.gov/sites/p... [energy.gov]

    • While in theory that makes sense, good luck banning mathematical computations. I suspect the process of detecting whether or not any computer was performing cryptocurrency computations would consume as much energy as the computations themselves.

      On the other hand, I think there’s probably a more efficient way than satellites to do what California wants. High altitude balloons?

      Now if we could also find a more efficient way to mine crypto... maybe put some of the machine learning algorithms into it.
      • Thats the whole point of crypto, is to make the computations expensive, if you make them efficient then it becomes easy to solve them from an energy perspective and everyone would do it, and then the price would not increase.

    • by hawk ( 1151 )

      but . . . but . . . then we wouldn't get a rocket launch with its *own* emissions, in the name, of course, fo catching other people's emissions . . .

      And am I *really* the only one concerned by the People's Republic of California having its own spy satellites??? They do enough damage to surrounding states without them. (and, yes, as a lawyer, I *have* dealt with them demanding that a Nevadan surrender his Nevada license to them . . .)

      If they care about emissions, they could *start* by not pumping all that

      • Not to mention sticking prop 65 lables on everything, and I really mean everything. Those people have a lot of hubris in CA, people buy the products whether they have lables it not. Go away CA, I hope you do into the ocean. And they do spread a lot of pollution across the west and are one of the main reasons the grand canyon is so smoggy

        • by hawk ( 1151 )

          After much research, the investigators concluded that the catastrophic failure of the rocket, killing all passengers, was due to an incorrectly placed prop 65 label providing incorrect friction between parts, triggering . . .

        • *drop into the ocean

          Gotta stop using this from mobile

  • Sacramento and Hollywood. These are the two groups of people capable of blowing smoke up their own asses.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • You don't need a satellite. You need a government that doesn't hide a known methane leak for over a year at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power owned Valley Generating Station [wikipedia.org].

Somebody ought to cross ball point pens with coat hangers so that the pens will multiply instead of disappear.

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