Montreal-based GHGSat plans to launch the world’s commercial satellite focused on carbon dioxide (CO2) monitoring later this year; launch provider and timing will be announced in the coming months.
The satellite, known as GHGSat-C10, uses a sensor already tested in space on the company’s six operational methane-hunting satellites. The fresh CO2 satellite will form part of a three-satellite cluster that includes two methane satellites as well. It’s also the second satellite GHGSat has launched with CO2 capabilities, although the first satellite was a testbed.
“For us, launching an [operational] CO2 satellite is really just completing our offering,” Stéphane Germain, president of GHGSat, told SpaceQ. “We decided to start with methane because there’s a more immediate market need and an obvious business case for it, whereas it was going to take a little longer to develop the carbon dioxide.”
There is plenty of the gas to look for, too.
The United States Environmental Protection Agency suggests that CO2 emissions have increased 90 percent since 1970, with fossil fuel combustion and industrial processes responsible for 78 percent of the total greenhouse gas emissions seen between 1970 and 2011.
In 2021, global CO2 reached a record 414.72 parts per million, and atmospheric CO2 is increasing 100 times faster than the natural baseline, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA’s) Climate.gov portal.
Some CO2 in the atmosphere is a good thing, but current global warming demonstrates that the current rate of emissions is fueling phenomena such as extreme weather – droughts, storms, flooding and the like. CO2, which Climate.gov describes as “Earth’s most important greenhouse gas,” naturally does absorb and radiate heat – and can redirect radiated heat from our planet in all directions, even reflecting again towards the surface.
The C10 satellite will examine CO2 emissions from power stations, cement plants, steel mills, petrochemical generators and similar facilities in search of greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to environmental pollution. GHGSat also seeks to help companies looking to comply with environmental and social governance standards that are quickly growing in popularity.
Many facilities of course do independent monitoring through drones or through continuous emissions monitoring systems, but GHGSat seeks to be an independent source of information that provides information in context from an orbital perch.
Notably, CO2 has been with GHGSat from the beginning. The demonstrator satellite “Claire” in 2016 was able to detect both CO2 and methane, but the company determined it was best to keep the two measuring systems apart on future iterations, Germain said. The design decision allows engineers to optimize the sensor spectroscopy to tune into the chemical signature of one gas or the other, improving performance overall.
Other lessons learned came from Claire as well.
“Also with Claire, we fixed some really basic things like stray light – there was a significant amount of stray light in the original instrument design, that we worked with world-class experts to mitigate and finally got through that. We learned to fix things like radiation damage we saw on Claire … the radiation damage isn’t all that bad, but it was bad enough that we wanted to make sure that we took the opportunity at hand to improve it even more.”
Naturally, with a seven-year gap since Claire’s launch there are also improvements in processing speed and capacity that will go into GHGSat-C10. Incidentally, GHGSat-C3 (“Luca”), C4 (“Penny”) and C5 (“Diako”) were the last three satellites from the company to launch on May 25, 2022 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. C7 and C8 will launch aboard the SpaceX Transporter 7 rideshare mission “in a few months,” Germain said.
All satellites launched to date, he added, “are just performing beautifully. They [the team] nailed it, frankly, with those satellites – and we’re just putting up the capacity that we need to serve our customers.” The predicted performance of the new sensor should allow C10 to see “megatons per year” emissions or larger, which are estimated to be in the thousands worldwide.
C10’s sensors have improved resolution – just 25 meters – over other CO2 satellites such as Japan’s GOSATS 1 and 2, the United States’ Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 and China’s TanSat.
This is possible through a design tradeoff allowing the satellite to deprioritize daily global coverage and instead to prioritize facility-level resolution, Germain said. That decision was made in concert with customers, with input from “people turning the wrenches to close the valves” on leaks, he said. Germain added that GHGSat seeks to work directly with operators to understand how emissions happen, as it could be a valve, a process issue or a maintenance event.
“We help them find their emissions – that’s number one. Number two, we help them get the real data, the measured data on their emissions … so they can compare. Then we help them track those emissions and see that the mitigations are working over time.”
Other key markets for GHGSat include governments and financial markets – the latter being investors looking at carbon footprints of different companies to make investment decisions between options.
Germain added the company is still looking for more coverage and shorter revisit times for both methane and CO2 monitoring as in some areas of the world they have sold out of capacity – even for the next six satellites that are expected to launch. “We need to add more capacity in order to be able to serve that demand in those locations.”