An $88 million satellite backed by billionaire Jeff Bezos that detected oil and gasoline trade emissions of the highly effective greenhouse gasoline methane has been lost in space, the group that operates stated on Tuesday (July 1, 2025).
MethaneSAT had been amassing emissions information and pictures from drilling websites, pipelines, and processing services all over the world since March, however went astray round 10 days in the past, the Environmental Defense Fund, which led the initiative, stated.
Its final recognized location was over Svalbard in Norway and EDF stated it didn’t count on it to be recovered because it had lost energy.
“We’re seeing this as a setback, not a failure,” Amy Middleton, senior vice chairman at EDF, instructed Reuters. “We’ve made so much progress and so much has been learned that if we hadn’t taken this risk, we wouldn’t have any of these learnings.”
The launch of MethaneSAT in March 2024 was a milestone in a years-long marketing campaign by EDF to carry accountable the greater than 120 international locations that in 2021 pledged to curb their methane emissions.
It additionally sought to assist implement an extra promise from 50 oil and gasoline firms made on the Dubai COP28 local weather summit in December 2023 to remove methane and routine gasoline flaring.
Methane is a potent greenhouse gasoline, with 80 instances the warming energy of carbon dioxide over a 20-year interval.
Scientists say capping leaks from oil and gasoline wells and gear is subsequently one of many quickest methods to start out tackling the issue of worldwide warming.
While MethaneSAT was not the one undertaking to publish satellite information on methane emissions, its backers stated it offered extra element on emissions sources and it partnered with Google to to create a publicly-available world map of emissions.
ENGINEERS INVESTIGATING
EDF reported the lost satellite to federal businesses together with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Federal Communications Commission and the U.S. Space Force on Tuesday, it stated.
Building and launching the satellite price $88 million, in accordance with the EDF. The group had obtained a $100 million grant from the Bezos Earth Fund in 2020 and received different main monetary assist from Arnold Ventures, the Robertson Foundation and the TED Audacious Project and EDF donors. The undertaking was additionally partnered with the New Zealand Space Agency.
EDF stated it had insurance coverage to cowl the loss and its engineers had been investigating what had occurred.
The group stated it could proceed to make use of its sources, together with plane with methane-detecting spectrometers, to search for methane leaks.
It additionally stated it was too early to say whether or not it could search to launch one other satellite however believed MethaneSAT proved {that a} extremely delicate instrument “could see total methane emissions, even at low levels, over wide areas.”
Despite the efforts to extend transparency on emissions, methane “super-emitters” have hardly ever taken motion when alerted that they’re leaking methane, the United Nations stated in a report final yr.
The stress on them to do has decreased because the United States underneath President Donald Trump’s second administration has successfully ended a U.S. program to gather greenhouse gasoline information from main polluters and rescinded Biden-era guidelines aimed toward curbing methane.
