Canadian satellite spies ‘significant’ emission of methane from Quebec landfill site

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For the past two years, the remote sensing company GHGSat has been scouring the globe and pinpointing sites where methane gas generated by human activity is spewing into the atmosphere and contributing to climate change.

On Friday, the Montreal-based company revealed another such location – this time in its own backyard.

An image provided by the company shows that a landfill site just north of the city was emitting methane at an estimated rate of nearly 1.2 tonnes per hour when one of the company’s six satellites passed overhead on Wednesday afternoon.

GHGSat said there is a 48-per-cent uncertainty range associated with the rate because of the complicating effects of wind. However, there is no ambiguity about where and when the methane was observed.

While far from the biggest release that GHGSat has seen worldwide, the detection is sizable for Canada, particularly if connected to a persistent leak rather than a one-off event.

“This is a fairly significant emission, considering that it would likely be emitting on a constant basis,” said Jean-François Gauthier, GHGSat vice-president of measurements and strategic initiatives.

The location, in the Montreal suburb of Terrebonne, Que., is operated by Complexe Enviro Connexions, part of Waste Connections Canada, a solid waste management company whose parent office is based in Texas.

In a statement, Izzie Abrams, the company’s vice-president for government and external affairs, confirmed the methane emission. He told The Globe and Mail that it “is related to work aimed at ensuring the efficiency of the biogas capture system” at the Terrebonne facility.

The statement also said that the system recovers 97 per cent of the natural gas that is produced at the site and that, “since its installation 10 years ago, some 1.3 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent of greenhouse gases have been avoided.”

Mr. Gauthier said it is not the first time that GHGSat has detected methane released at the facility and it is one of a “handful” of landfill sites across Canada where its satellites have seen methane escaping at comparable levels.

“This site has been on our list for a long time,” he said.

The selection of the Montreal site was partly a result of weather and timing, Mr. Gauthier said, since the satellites, which use infrared light to detect the methane, cannot observe sources under cloud cover.

GHGSat does not routinely publicize the exact locations of the methane releases it observes. That is information that the company normally provides to its paying customers and partners in government and industry.

However, during international climate talks currently under way in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, the company has said it will post one recent observation per day to highlight the pervasive problem of methane. The invisible gas is 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide at trapping atmospheric heat and is responsible for approximately one quarter of global warming.

At the talks on Friday, UN officials rolled out a methane alert and response system that depends on satellite observations, in particular those provided by GHGSat.

While other groups are working to launch methane-spotting satellites, the Canadian company is so far unique in the data it can provide.

Methane leaks are most often associated with emissions from the fossil-fuel industry, and GHGSat has seen many of these, including in Canada’s oil patch. However, data gathered by the company this year has also demonstrated the contributions that landfill sites are making to methane emissions worldwide.

In one study published in the journal Science Advances, researchers based in the Netherlands and the U.S. used data from an instrument aboard a European Space Agency satellite, coupled with GHGSat’s narrower and sharper views, to identify large-scale methane emissions from a number of landfill sites around the world. Some of the sites were found to be emitting at rates 10 times higher than anything seen in Canada.

The authors of the study concluded that the amount of methane released from those sites is 1.4 to 2.6 times larger than reported in emissions inventories, widely used as a reference for negotiations and climate projections.

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In a news briefing with reporters last week, Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault, said Canada would continue to rely on a self-reporting system for methane emissions by industry, but one that “will be correlated with information that we get from companies like GHGSat to confirm that the data that’s being reported is actually accurate.”

At the same briefing, GHGSat president Stéphane Germain added that the company had just decided that one of its next satellites, to be launched in 2023, would be dedicated to monitoring sources of carbon dioxide, the most significant cause of climate change.