GHGSat

GHGSat flies its own fleet of 16 kilogram satellites, each carrying a Fabry-Perot spectrometer that reads shortwave infrared sunlight for the signature of methane. The instrument resolves plumes at about 25 metres and picks up leaks down to roughly 100 kilograms an hour, enough to trace a plume to a single well pad, mine shaft or pipeline compressor. The company sells the resulting data and analytics; the satellites are not for sale.

Public climate satellites map methane by country and basin. GHGSat's bet is that attribution at the level of an individual facility is what operators and regulators will pay commercial rates for, because a plume with a name attached becomes a work order. Since 2023 it has also flown Vanguard, the first commercial satellite to attribute carbon dioxide to a single site.

The first demonstration satellite, Claire, launched in 2016. The fleet stood at 13 by mid-2025, the largest commercial greenhouse gas constellation, and two more went up that November during the COP30 climate summit. An expansion to around 21 satellites for daily revisit of industrial sites has been announced but is still in progress. The demand side is the risk. Methane rules are politically fragile, disclosure is partly voluntary, and the company's usage figures, millions of facilities monitored and tens of thousands of detections a year, are its own numbers.