At three minutes to midnight on June 21, 2016, a low-thrust rocket was launched in the deep dark from India’s Satish Dhawan Space Centre carrying an extra-special payload: a 15-kilogram demo satellite the size of a microwave oven developed by Montreal-based GHGSat. Less than 30 minutes later, “Claire,” as she is known, was orbiting the Earth at a cool 7 km per second, 512 km above its surface. Armed with a wide-angle Fabry-Perot imaging spectrometer, which has a field of vision of 12 km2 and is able to measure methane concentrations at any point on Earth every two days, Claire’s job was to prove that a small, relatively inexpensive microsatellite could identify and quantify emissions of climate-warming greenhouse gases (GHGs), particularly methane, from specific industrial facilities. It was the first satellite ever to do so.
GHGSat’s maiden satellite was wildly successful. Claire still orbits the Earth 15 times a day, every day, taking measurements from industrial sites all over the world: oil wells in Texas, oil sands in Canada, power plants in Europe, coal mines in China, even rice paddies in Vietnam. “Today’s launch is a milestone for Canadian space technology and for human environmental responsibility,” said Stéphane Germain, president of GHGSat. “Until now, measuring GHG emissions from industrial facilities has often been difficult and costly. Claire has the potential to offer consistent, objective greenhouse gas emissions measurements for everyone in the world.”
Thanks to Claire’s impressive rookie season, big money started rolling in to GHGSat. By 2021 the company had raised tens of millions of dollars from various private investors, among them four of the biggest oil sands companies—Imperial Oil, Shell, CNRL and Suncor—and the Canadian Oil Sands Innovation Alliance (COSIA). It also received public money from Emissions Reduction Alberta and the governments of Alberta and Canada, the latter of which acknowledged in late 2021 its “long-standing collaboration” with GHGSat. All of this enabled the launch of two more satellites, “Iris” and “Hugo,” both with an order of magnitude better performance than their older sibling Claire.
Perhaps the perfect proof of concept was when Claire detected massive methane plumes from oil and gas production and transmission infrastructure in Turkmenistan from 2017 to 2019, which eventually led to a five megatonne per year leak being capped. Even more impressive, Iris noticed the smallest methane cloud ever detected, a planned, controlled leak of just 260 kilograms of CH4 per hour (equivalent to the emissions from a large landfill) in Alberta in late September 2020.
According to Germain, the 2021 investment of $20-million from Sustainable Development Technology Canada, the department’s third investment, will enable GHGSat to complete its vision of a constellation of at least 10 high-resolution methane-detecting satellites. Three of those—“Luca,” “Penny” and “Diako”—were sent into orbit in August 2022, doubling GHGSat’s monitoring capabilities. Five more will join them this year. Soon, no methane molecule will be able to hide from the inquisitive sensors of GHGSat’s decuplet of microsatellites.
That day can’t come soon enough. Like everywhere else that has sprawling networks of aging oil and gas infrastructure, Alberta has a significant and largely invisible methane measurement and management problem—though you’d never know it from the glowing reviews from the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) or the UCP government’s energy “war room.” These and other oil and gas propagandists happily regurgitate the highly suspicious and unconfirmable claim by Alberta Environment and Parks that the province’s oil and gas industry is on track to meet its 45 per cent methane reduction target by 2025, even as oil production has increased by 58 per cent and gas production by 21 per cent over the last decade.
Although the federal and Alberta governments rarely agree on anything, the federal Ministry of Environment and Climate Change’s (ECC) December 2021 “Review of Canada’s Methane Regulations for the Upstream Oil and Gas Sector” went out of its way to assert that Canada (including Alberta, the largest source of oil and gas methane emissions) is “on track to meet its 2025 target for methane reductions from the upstream oil and gas sector.” Never mind that the report is a little unsure of whether the target is 40 or 45 per cent of 2012 emissions, and that Alberta’s target relies on a 2014 baseline rather than 2012, and that Alberta doesn’t include methane emissions from oil sands mining and upgrading (but the feds do), and that, in the end, what the federal review actually concludes is that “the federal and provincial methane regulations alone are modelled to achieve methane emission reductions of 39 per cent by 2025.” Which essentially leaves a negative margin of error and the need for a hope and a prayer a) that the models are spot on, and b) that when the process is repeated in 2025, God will be with you.
There is one saving grace. Whoever wrote the ECC report, released two days before Christmas to meet the looming December 31, 2022, deadline, had the dignity to admit, on the second-last page, that “the Government recognizes atmospheric measurements of methane have indicated that the official national inventory underestimates emissions from Canada’s oil and gas sector.” This sentiment is also found in the federal government’s 2022 National Inventory Report of Greenhouse Gases, which includes quantified estimates of “uncertainty” in the calculation of the numbers. This last factor can be as large as, for example, –48 per cent to +71.5 per cent for emissions from Canada’s abandoned oil and gas wells.
These caveats, as we shall see, are an important acknowledgement that despite all the time and money and political capital that goes into producing these (almost assuredly inaccurate) numbers, a host of expert opinion and reams of scientific papers beg to differ. They’re also evidence that the federal Liberal government, for all its egregious flaws, might just have the humility necessary to get the numbers right in a process that will help determine not only the fate of the planet but the future of Alberta’s economy. Sadly, humility is a character trait in short supply among the apparatchiks in Alberta’s UCP government.
Methane has been an essential enabler of modern existence since the late 18th century, when it began to illuminate streets and homes in Britain. With four hydrogen atoms bound to a single carbon one, methane (CH4) is the simplest hydrocarbon and the principal component (70–90 per cent) of natural gas, which today is used around the world as a fuel for everything from barbecues to powerplants. This facilitates the release of a staggering amount of methane, 350 megatonnes minimum, around the globe every year.
Unfortunately methane comes with a good deal of planet-altering baggage. The problem with CH4 is that it’s very good at absorbing energy, which makes it a greenhouse gas 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide over the course of its lifetime, and 80 times stronger in the first two decades. The concentration of methane in Earth’s atmosphere has increased 2.5 times since the Industrial Revolution—and tripled in the last century—and it accounts for roughly 30 per cent of the rise in global temperatures since the 1800s, reaching an unprecedented high of well past 1,900 parts per billion in 2022, the year Luca, Penny and Diako took to the skies. This is the highest level in at least the last 800,000 years. All of this means that the best and perhaps only way to slow climate warming is to dramatically reduce methane emissions.
Canada, as the fourth-largest producer of oil and gas in the world, has its work cut out for it. Data for 2021 from the European Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research indicates that Canada has been the worst G7 country for lowering greenhouse gas emissions since 2005, the starting point for targets under the Paris climate agreement. While Canada has decreased carbon emissions by 3 per cent, it is the only G7 nation that increased methane emissions between 2005 and 2021, by 2.7 per cent, a troubling piece of evidence that our methane-accounting methods may not be exactly what they seem.
Of the four main sources of methane in Canada, three are human-caused: fossil fuel extraction and production, agriculture (mostly livestock manure) and solid-waste disposal, which is to say landfills. The fourth is wetlands, at just 8 per cent. Where once methane was emitted only by Nature, it is now largely a by-product of our suicidal addiction to fossil fuels.
Alberta is the Canadian epicentre of methane emissions. As of 2020, Canada’s official inventory of GHG emissions lists our province, with 13 per cent of Canada’s population, as the source of 40 per cent of the whole country’s methane, 60 per cent of it care of the oil and gas sector. As if that weren’t bad enough, Alberta hosts seven of Canada’s 11 biggest methane “hotspots,” a group of facilities that, as of 2018, each spewed at least 0.22 Mt CO2eq annually all by themselves (roughly the same warming potential as the CO2 emitted by 50,000 passenger cars a year).
Alberta has a significant and largely invisible methane measurement and management problem.
Most methane emissions from oil and gas infrastructure, in Alberta and elsewhere, are from the venting and flaring of natural gas and from “fugitive emissions” that leak surreptitiously from pipelines, compressors and wells in the “conventional” oil and gas industry. This is why most of the new regulations have been focused here. The good news, however, is that a strong business case can be made for the oil and gas industry to invest in mitigation, regulations or not, because methane is a valuable commodity. The International Energy Agency, no enemy of the oil and gas industry, concluded that reducing methane emissions from the industry is not only possible with existing technology but up to half of these reductions could be achieved at no additional cost to industry, because the value of the captured methane would be more than the cost of the necessary retrofits.
This is perhaps why federal environment minister Stephen Guilbeault in early 2022 upgraded Canada’s methane reduction goal, joining the Global Methane Pledge and announcing that the oil and gas sector would have to reduce emissions by at least 75 per cent from 2012 levels by 2030, a mere seven years away. He also announced an ambitious framework for new regulations. Wrote Jan Gorski, director of the Pembina Institute’s oil and gas program, after the announcement: “We should all be excited about methane, given that it presents us with a win-win-win for the government, industry and Canadians. On our path to net-zero by 2050, this is a rare opportunity that we should grasp with both hands.”
The bad news, however, is that despite all the numbers and estimates from Canada’s latest annual National Inventory Report and other sources, we don’t have a good idea of how much of this potent greenhouse gas we’re wafting into the atmosphere, never mind which facilities or corporations or governments are responsible for how much of what kind of climate-warming pollution.
Which is why I wanted to talk to Stéphane Germain, the president, CEO and founder of GHGSat. His company has received many millions of dollars of public money from Canadian governments and boasts that its orbiting satellites have been monitoring the Alberta oil and gas sector for years. In 2020 alone, the GHGSat constellation “made over 550,000 facility measurements and identified nearly 8 Mt of methane emissions worldwide.” More importantly, Germain has committed to making his company’s data “widely available to accelerate global transparency in greenhouse gas emissions.”
But as the weeks went by, my numerous phone calls and emails and direct messages (and prayers) remained unanswered. So too were my many requests for information or comments on GHGSat’s work in Alberta to: the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER), Imperial Oil, Minister Stephen Guilbeault and his press secretary, Kaitlin Power, and the media contact at the federal Ministry of Environment and Climate Change. You’d think they’d want to talk. After all, Germain and Guilbeault had announced on November 2, 2021, at COP26, that they were providing the International Methane Emissions Observatory, for the first time ever, with a high-resolution methane emission satellite dataset made by GHGSat.
Only the Pathways Alliance, the latest collaboration of the biggest oil sands companies, which is prone to making wild promises it likely won’t be able to keep, got back to me. Adviser Jerrica Goodwin sent along an apology and a statement from Pathways Alliance’s VP of technology development, Wes Jickling. Apart from confirming what I already knew, the note cursorily explained why any data the Alliance does have from the GHGSat satellites is not ready to be made public. (“More testing and data analysis is needed.”)
Industry and government have been happily boasting in public for many years about GHGSat’s “remarkable” work and what its satellites have found, complete with full-colour pictures of emissions plumes from almost every other oil-producing part of the world. But neither GHGSat nor the governments and industries it serves have provided any meaningful information (or images) related to Alberta’s methane problem. Despite the investments the federal government has poured into GHGSat, it’s clear that the “global transparency” contemplated by the company’s CEO and founder has yet to come to the unconventional oil capital of Canada.
This “control the message” strategy of regulating pollution, pioneered in Alberta by former premier Ralph Klein and his communications cabal, is eerily familiar. For decades government and industry, aided and abetted by consultants of various sorts, have told us that the extravagant destruction in the Alberta oil sands region was not contaminating the land, the air and the water. Turns out that even as the tailings ponds leak persistently into surface and groundwater, the monitoring system deployed by the Regional Aquatic Monitoring Program, once dubbed “world class,” could hardly have been designed to be more useless—except as secret licence to continue to pollute. “If the oil sands were as free of pollution as the greenwashers claim,” scientist David Schindler presciently declaimed at the time, “it would be equivalent to an immaculate conception.”
A 2020 study found that methane emissions in Alberta and Saskatchewan were nearly twice those being reported.
Alberta claims in its “2021 Methane Emissions Management from the Upstream Oil and Gas Sector in Alberta” report, that its oil and gas industry only emitted 15 megatonnes of CO2 equivalent that year, 37 per cent lower than the federal government’s most recent estimate. It also claims that methane emissions had declined 44 per cent from 2014 levels. All of this somehow occurred even before the Alberta government had instituted regulations to “address the primary sources of methane emissions from Alberta’s upstream oil and gas industry.”
There has been some success. After people in the Peace Region complained (and complained and complained) about noxious fumes from sour gas, the province in 2014 finally imposed strict rules limiting methane emissions from heavy oil production, including mandatory monthly leak-detection surveys and a ban on routine venting at high-risk sources. The result? Virtually all methane emissions were eliminated from the targeted sources.
Still, Alberta’s rosy analysis at the provincial level is likely incorrect, because it relies on a complicated bottom-up (a.k.a. component- or inventory-based) approach that has been roundly criticized. Numerous peer-reviewed studies use better, measurement-based approaches to obtain more-accurate emissions data, and they’ve found that current bottom-up estimates of methane emissions all over the world are universally low. In 2022 the IEA found that actual global methane emissions from the energy sector are 70 per cent higher than reported in official data. A 2020 study by scientists from the climate research division of Environment and Climate Change Canada found that methane emissions from the upstream oil and gas industry in Alberta and Saskatchewan were nearly twice those published in the federal government’s National Inventory Report.
A 2022 study by US-based Environmental Defense Fund suggests only about 28 per cent of Alberta’s upstream oil and gas methane emissions are based on reported data, and that the more comprehensive reporting initiated in 2020 “could represent a significant fraction of the apparent emission reductions since 2012.” This finding, the authors conclude, “poses a significant problem for the validation of the stated 40–45 per cent reduction from 2012 levels.” A more recent study found that heavy oil facilities in Saskatchewan were emitting methane at nearly four times the amount reported to the federal government, illustrating “the importance of independent monitoring, reporting and verification to ensure accuracy in reporting and regulatory compliance.”
There’s also the embarrassing fact that despite being ignored by the Alberta government (and even the Pembina Institute) and discounted by the feds, we’ve long known that the oil sands are far from insignificant when it comes to methane. Five of Canada’s methane hotspots are oil sands projects, which together emit 1.75 Mt CO2eq of methane annually—equal to about 10 per cent of Alberta’s total oil and gas industry methane emissions. This same study estimated methane emissions from just four oil sands mines (Suncor’s, CNRL’s Horizon, and Syncrude’s Mildred Lake and Aurora facilities) account for 1.5 Mt CO2eq every year.
Another study published five years ago, which used aircraft fitted with sensors to measure summer methane rates from Alberta’s oil sands region, found that the five biggest oil sands facilities emitted the annual equivalent of 4.25 Mt CO2eq. This is at least twice as much as the fugitive emissions from all of Canada’s coal mines and almost eight times more than the leakage from Alberta’s 250,000 (or more) abandoned oil and gas wells, which Danielle Smith was at one time keen to spend 20 billion taxpayer dollars to clean up.
Bottom-up estimates used to be the only option we had to guesstimate methane emissions. But with satellite technology, methods have improved a lot. To claim, as the AER has, that traditional bottom-up estimates “reflect the best available data at the time and may not align with emission estimates conducted by other parties,” without even acknowledging, as the federal government has, that “atmospheric measurements of methane have indicated that the official [bottom-up] national inventory underestimates emissions,” seems naïve at best and duplicitous at worst.
Even more confounding is the fact that the AER actually has access to atmospheric measurements from satellites but apparently doesn’t use them in its model. GHGSat has been monitoring Alberta oil and gas infrastructure for years on behalf of both the AER and some of the corporations they purport to regulate. The AER is also a user of data from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-5P satellite—but you’d never know it from searching the AER website.
More concerning: the AER missed a September 28, 2022, methane plume at a “hub of oil and gas” west of Lloydminster with an emission rate of 11 tonnes an hour. It was instead identified by a French firm, Kayrros SAS, using Sentinel-5P data. Why? Because AER doesn’t use the Level 2 data that reflects methane concentrations for each orbit, instead using the Level 3 dataset that averages concentrations over time, conveniently making it impossible to pinpoint a perpetrator and make them stop.
Overall, the promise that current regulations and market-based incentives will reduce methane emissions seems to amount to so much Alberta government mumbo jumbo. Torleif Haugland, a Norwegian economist and statistician who co-founded Carbon Limits AS and is an expert in climate change mitigation, sees through the mire. In a concise and straightforward manner, he concluded in a 2020 case study about Alberta for a UN project on best practices for methane management in the oil and gas sector that “the ambitious target to reduce methane emissions from 27 million tonnes CO2 equivalents recorded in 2014 to 15 million tonnes CO2 equivalents by 2025 is not on track to be met.” This is largely because fugitive emissions, which are significant and “present a quantification challenges,” fall “outside the carbon pricing system and offset system.”
What are we to make of yet another vast gap between the data-based conclusions of the scientific community and the unsubstantiated assertions of a captured government that has a history of getting these kinds of things very, very wrong? I’d suggest it’s just the latest data point in a predictable pattern, which scientist David Schindler spent his career unmasking. Failure to adequately monitor, measure and regulate pollution from the fossil fuel industry has been a hallmark of every conservative government since “King Ralph” dismantled our science and regulatory capacities, bequeathed to Big Oil the keys to the royal treasury, and cloaked the coup in a shroud of buffoonery and secrecy.
Methane is both invisible and perilous, which makes it a potent symbol for the inscrutable logic of Alberta’s increasingly out-of-touch conservative politicians. Until we free ourselves from “leaders” that exude such palpable duplicity and incompetence, we’ll never know with any certainty whether our government is telling us the truth and looking after our best interests. History suggests this formula will only lead to the continued degradation of our land, water and air and to an ever-hotter climate. It’s like relying on an addict to manage your money; eventually, the story ends in bankruptcy.
Jeff Gailus grew up in Calgary and now lives in Montana. He is writing a memoir about family, history and fascism.
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