Estimating the Global Oil-Gas Methane Emission Rate Distribution at Facility Scale using Multiple Satellite Systems

Dylan Jervis, Jean Philippe MacLean, Jason McKeever, Mathias Strupler, Antoine Ramier

We estimate the global oil and gas (OG) emission rate distribution above ~20 kg h-1 at facility scale using 16,294 quantified OG methane emission rates detected from five high-resolution satellite instrument/data processing combinations in 2024 and 2025 (GHGSat/GHGSat, Tanager/Carbon Mapper, EMIT/Carbon Mapper, Sentinel-2/IMEO-MARS, Landsat/IMEO-MARS). We find that the emission rate distribution is well-described by a lognormal model. Because our estimation method explicitly incorporates a model for each system’s detection sensitivity, we simultaneously retrieve the facility scale, condition-averaged “survey-mode” detection probability for each satellite system. We estimate the relative spatio-temporal coverage of each satellite system directly from their measured emission rates and quantify the effective spatial coverage by calculating the Earth Mover’s Distance between each satellite system’s plume detection locations and the Global Fuel Exploitation Inventory v3 OG predictions, estimating that all satellite systems have global coverage of OG emissions within sampling error. The OG facility scale emission rate distribution estimate is constrained by the largest collection of satellite detections to date, providing valuable information about the expected number of OG emission events at different emission rates. Finally, the detection probability, spatial and temporal coverage estimates are combined into a total relative observation completeness metric for each satellite system that should be of interest to research and policy makers for understanding the relative survey capabilities of different high-resolution satellite systems.