MethaneSAT Goes Silent After a Year in Orbit, Removing One of the Few Tools Built to Measure Basin-Wide Methane

MethaneSAT, a satellite built to measure methane emissions from oil and gas production regions around the world, lost contact with its operators on 20 June 2025. The Environmental Defense Fund, which developed the mission through a subsidiary, said the satellite had lost power and was unlikely to be recoverable. Operators made attempts to re-establish communication over the following weeks without success, according to MethaneSAT's project updates. Reuters reported the loss on 1 July. The satellite was launched in March 2024 on a SpaceX rocket and had been collecting data for about a year.

The International Energy Agency's Global Methane Tracker 2025, published in May, estimated that methane emissions from the energy sector remain above 120 million metric tons a year, considerably higher than levels implied by official reporting. The gap between measured and reported emissions is central to methane policy. Methane measurement has become a commercial issue as well as a regulatory one. The loss of MethaneSAT does not leave the world without methane monitoring. What is missing is a dedicated instrument for basin-wide quantification at MethaneSAT's combination of coverage and precision.

Federal rules finalized in 2024 allowed approved third parties to report large emission events detected by remote sensing, which operators would then have to investigate. For gas buyers, particularly in Europe and Asia, independent methane data are becoming part of how they assess suppliers. The loss of MethaneSAT reduces the amount of independent, basin-level data available to support or challenge producers' claims. For producers with genuinely low emissions, independent data can be a commercial advantage, because it supports premium pricing or preferred supplier status.

The Environmental Defense Fund has said it will continue to analyze and publish the data MethaneSAT collected before contact was lost, which cover many of the world's major oil and gas basins. Key developments include the publication of MethaneSAT's archived data, the European Commission's implementing rules for methane import requirements, and the progress of other methane monitoring missions.