The truth of the matter is that there is much about the oil and gas industry’s methane emissions that isn’t especially new. We’ve been hearing for years that methane is considered the second-most-harmful greenhouse gas overall after CO2, that methane is 28–80 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas, and that the oil and gas sector continues to be responsible for a large fraction of the world’s methane emissions.
Despite an impressive amount of attention being paid to this topic throughout the SPE and the industry over the past decade, the International Energy Agency estimates that the oil and gas sector (upstream and downstream combined) emitted over 81 million metric tons of methane in 2025, which translates to more than 21% of the total methane emissions that can be attributed to human activity during that timeframe. But let’s be honest: As confronting as these numbers might be, many oil and gas industry insiders were largely aware of them already.
And many of the technologies being used to track methane aren’t all that new, either. Satellites have been used to monitor and measure methane emissions around the world for at least 10 years. It has also been possible for quite some time to augment intelligence from satellites with data sets from other collection methods and technologies—including aircraft, drones, ground-based systems, and continuous monitors—to create a joined-up, detailed understanding of what is happening with regard to methane emissions almost everywhere in the world. However, as technologically impressive as they are, most of these capabilities also don’t come as a total surprise to the oil and gas industry.
But a change is underway that will very likely prove to be materially important to the sector, and that will definitely be worthy of its attention. What’s different these days is the nature of the organizations that are collecting methane emissions data and what they intend to do with it. A handful of benevolent organizations have popped up that are offering this information for free. Carbon Mapper, a philanthropic coalition supported by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and several other high-profile organizations, offers a publicly accessible online portal that readily shares at no cost information about methane and CO2 super-emitters across the globe.
Similarly, the Environmental Defense Fund launched MethaneSAT in 2024, and the satellite collected significant amounts of data before they lost contact with it in June 2025. Despite its shorter-than-expected lifespan, however, MethaneSAT captured vast troves of emissions data that are still being distributed around the world to improve our collective understanding of where methane emissions are happening.
And these kinds of benevolent activities go beyond the launching of satellites. In 2021, the United Nations opened the International Methane Emissions Observatory to act as a data clearinghouse to help with “putting open, reliable, and actionable data directly into the hands of individuals with the power to reduce emissions.” The Global Methane Hub was similarly established in 2021 to cultivate “a global network of scientists, experts, activists, policymakers, and philanthropists, all pushing in the same direction toward the single goal of mitigating methane.”
There are now even groups offering what are tantamount to scientific “do-it-yourself kits” to facilitate other people who want to create and share emissions data from an impressive range of sources. A global team of researchers led by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently released the Integrated Methane Inversion platform, which they describe as “an open-access cloud-computing tool enabling users to quantify methane emissions for any region worldwide at up to 12-km resolution by analytical inversion of satellite observations.” And the academic literature has seen a flurry of papers in the past few years documenting how publicly available satellite data sources that weren’t explicitly intended for measuring methane emissions can, with an appropriate amount of mathematical gymnastics, be repurposed to those ends (e.g., Mohammadimanesh et al. 2025, Varon et al. 2021).
These shifts in the landscape of methane emissions monitoring carry with them tectonic changes in the tone of how these conversations are happening within and about the oil and gas industry. Whereas discussions about emissions used to be largely predicated on self-reported data, methane emitters now face a new reality of hyper-transparency in which these kinds of information are democratized—that is, the data is generated and analyzed by a broad range of people and organizations with vastly different motivations, and the data is made freely available to anyone who wants it.
In this new reality, it’s no longer sufficient to be vaguely aware of your emissions in a timeframe that feels convenient to you. Armed with hyper-transparent and democratized data, a broad range of stakeholders—from government watchdogs to shareholders to nonprofit organizations—will quite possibly know about your emissions-related missteps before you do. In this way, methane emissions these days are like having spinach in your teeth at a cocktail party: it’s embarrassing, and everybody else in the room probably knows about it before you figure it out.
This fundamental shift in how information and awareness are created in the methane emissions domain will very likely unleash a wave of disruption with regard to how monitoring happens everywhere in the world. In fact, this is already starting to happen. Predicated on an understanding that “remote sensing technologies for methane super-emitters [are] already utilized by many entities for this type of detection,” the US state of New Mexico is currently considering a new law in which third-party notifiers would be able to inform the state’s Environment Department about natural gas emissions. The state would handle the policing of the state’s emissions laws but, instead of investing heavily on its own detection and measurement capabilities, the New Mexico Environment Department is seriously considering outsourcing that job to trusted outside organizations. As more and better emissions data is supplied to other governments beyond New Mexico in the future and, as this third-party data model becomes more normal, tighter regulatory compliance standards around the world can’t be too far behind.
How oil and gas are purchased in global markets will probably change as a result of this, too. Major gas buyers in places like Europe are already advocating regulatory frameworks that will ultimately favor suppliers with the lowest verified emissions. Credible emissions data will become needed to certify cleaner gas, directly impacting the bottom lines of the companies trying to sell it.
These changes in the oil and gas landscape will, in turn, almost certainly lead to more demand for emissions-related intelligence by potential emitters who will be desperate to know about their next leak before the rest of the world tells them about it. Simply put, oil and gas companies will seek out the services of emissions-monitoring organizations to help them answer the question “Do I have spinach in my teeth?” before any embarrassment is experienced.
Robert K. Perrons, SPE, is the CEO of EMSat.com, a global leader in satellite-based methane monitoring services. He is also a professor at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. Earlier in his career, Perrons worked in a variety of roles around the world for Shell International’s exploration and production division, and served as the company’s executive coordinator of global R&D. He holds a bachelor of engineering degree in mechanical engineering from McMaster University, a master’s degree in technology and policy from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a PhD degree in engineering from the University of Cambridge, where he was a Gates Cambridge Scholar. Perrons was also a Fulbright Scholar, and is a member of the UN’s Resources and Energy Expert Group.
Jared Keller is the CTO of EMSat.com, bringing over 20 years of experience in technology leadership, cloud architecture, and artificial intelligence (AI)-powered systems. He holds an MS degree in information management from the University of Washington. Before joining EMSat.com, Keller served as CTO of Advanced Mobility Analytics Group, where he led the development of scalable edge and cloud-based video analytics solutions for transportation safety across Australia, the US, and Canada. He previously founded Intellitonic, a digital marketing and analytics agency, and before that was a founding member and vice president of engineering at Conversica, where he built and led the company’s AI-powered software-as-a-service sales automation platform.
For Further Reading
Advancements in Satellite-Based Methane Point Source Monitoring: A Systematic Review by F. Mohammadimanesh, M. Mahdianpari, A. Radman, D. Varon, M. Hemati, and M. Marjani. ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (2025).
High-Frequency Monitoring of Anomalous Methane Point Sources With Multispectral Sentinel-2 Satellite Observations by D.J. Varon, D. Jervis, J. McKeever, I. Spence, D. Gains, and D.J. Jacob. Atmospheric Measurement Techniques (2021).
The views and opinions expressed in guest editorials published in JPT are those of the individual authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy, position, or views of SPE, its members, or its affiliates.