GHGSat, which uses a fleet of satellites to monitor greenhouse gas emissions from space, signed a partnership with ExxonMobil Corp. to scrutinize sources of methane for the U.S. giant’s onshore operations in Canada, the United States, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea.
While financial terms were not shared, a press release about the partnership called it a “significant investment” by ExxonMobil, which has taken other measures already to reduce emissions intensity by more than 60% since 2016. This number should increase to between 70% and 80% by 2030, according to the companies’ officials.
ExxonMobil will bring GHGSat’s platform into its Center for Operations and Methane Emissions Tracking (COMET), which “continuously monitors and analyzes methane emissions data from a network of measurement technologies,” the release stated.
GHGSat has launched 14 satellites since 2016 and says it can find methane leaks as small as 100 kg/hr, which is a scale allowing for identification of individual equipment at fault. The company says it has mitigated more than 20 megatons CO2E of methane since it began operations.
The partnership with ExxonMobil was announced just over two months after GHGSat brought its 13th and 14th satellites to space, which are called Pierre (C-12) and Valmay (C-13) after the children of GHGSat employees. SpaceX launched the satellites aboard its Transporter-14 rideshare mission in June.
This launch was especially notable for GHGSat as these additions to the larger constellation were said to allow the company to monitor emissions of all types on a daily basis – and revisit abilities will grow quickly, as the company says it plans to have 21 satellites on-orbit by 2026.
This high revisit rate by the satellite group, paired with the sensitive detectors, are what GHGSat is using in its positioning with customers and with media about its distinction in the market.
“As global demand grows for high-quality emissions data, this collaboration underscores the trust leading companies place in our technology to drive meaningful impact,” GHGSat CEO Stéphane Germain said in the statement about the ExxonMobile partnership.
ExxonMobil’s chief environmental scientist, Matt Kolesar, added the GHGSat constellation would allow his company to “monitor assets at scale via satellite for the first time, informing mitigation strategy and action.”
GHGSat often says that methane is not only a greenhouse gas harmful to the environment, but that removing leaks allows for oil and gas producers to bring up their yields, and to comply with export policies with nations that have strict emissions standards.
Constant monitoring of sites is crucial, officials wrote in June, because “methane is over 80 times more potent than COâ‚‚ [carbon dioxide] over a 20-year period [and] it also breaks down in the atmosphere much faster—within about a decade.”
Aside from its recent commercial partnerships, GHGSat shared in July that it was the first Canadian company to partner with the International Charter for Space and Major Disasters. This news came a few weeks after GHGSat worked with local and federal response teams in California during the devastating wildfires early in 2025. “Through the charter, government authorities around the world will now be able to draw on GHGSat’s facility-level methane and carbon dioxide data to assess the health of critical energy infrastructure and risks to public safety,” company officials wrote. Their work in Los Angeles, officials added, focused on methane emissions in infrastructure that supported “the swift assessment of safety risks to the roughly 3.8 million people across the metropolitan area.”