An $88 million satellite backed by billionaire Jeff Bezos that was tracking methane emissions from the oil and gas industry has been lost in space, the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) said on Tuesday.
The satellite, known as MethaneSAT, had been collecting emissions data and imagery from drilling sites, pipelines, and processing facilities around the world since March. It went off course approximately 10 days ago, EDF said. Its last known position was over Svalbard, Norway, and the organization confirmed it had lost power and is not expected to be recovered.
“We’re seeing this as a setback, not a failure,” Amy Middleton, senior vice president at EDF, told 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.”
A major climate initiative
Launched in March 2024, MethaneSAT was a milestone in EDF’s long-running campaign to hold countries and companies accountable for their methane emissions. More than 120 nations pledged in 2021 to curb methane, and in December 2023, 50 oil and gas companies at the COP28 climate summit in Dubai also promised to eliminate methane leaks and routine gas flaring.
Methane is a highly potent greenhouse gas with 80 times the warming power of carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. Scientists say reducing leaks from oil and gas infrastructure is one of the fastest ways to address global warming.
While Methane SAT was not the only satellite monitoring methane emissions, it was designed to provide high-resolution data on specific sources. It also partnered with Google to create a publicly accessible global map of methane emissions.
Investigation underway
EDF reported the satellite’s loss to several federal agencies, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and the U.S. Space Force.
The total cost to build and launch MethaneSAT was $88 million. EDF received a $100 million grant from the Bezos Earth Fund in 2020, as well as additional funding from Arnold Ventures, the Robertson Foundation, the TED Audacious Project, and EDF donors. The New Zealand Space Agency was also a project partner.
EDF said it has insurance to cover the satellite loss, and engineers are investigating what went wrong.
Despite the setback, EDF said it would continue its methane-tracking efforts using other resources, including aircraft equipped with methane-detecting spectrometers.
It is too early to determine whether the organization will launch a replacement satellite, but EDF emphasized that MethaneSAT demonstrated the feasibility of using highly sensitive instruments to detect total methane emissions over wide areas.
Political context and emission transparency
Despite global efforts to increase transparency, the United Nations reported last year that major methane “super-emitters” have rarely acted when alerted about leaks. That pressure has further declined under President Donald Trump’s second term, as his administration has dismantled a U.S. program that collected greenhouse gas data from major polluters and reversed Biden-era rules aimed at curbing methane.
