I used to work on this at a methane monitoring shop. Others have good points.
Monitoring from the ground using methane sensors that detect the gas directly requires a lot of human labor. You need to send people out to often remote locations to set up bulky tripods full of (still expensive) sensors. You need some expensive data backhaul because these places often don’t have cellular access. We were billed by the byte to have a 24/7 contract with uptime guarantees in some of these locations. One big issue is that the companies paying for self-monitoring want suspiciously low false positives (for legal compliance reasons). You have to work with the land owners if you expect them to let you put sensors on their sites. This limits who can access that data compared to a NGO running a satellite, and requires you to filter out “noise” that’s probably not noise to appease the customers. They’re also not very accurate at detecting source in that close distance. Gases tend to quickly rise above where a human can place a sensor array and the wind and environmental factors play a huge impact. Very few companies are willing to stand behind their physics modeling with any kind of SLA. The human cost also shouldn’t be understated: when my coworkers would go and set up these sensors they’d be dizzy for days/weeks due to the emitted gasses they breathed in, our employer basically couldn’t find affordable medical insurance for us.
If you want to use spectroscopy/cameras, you can do it from a (small) distance. But it’s fantastically expensive equipment that only can be used for 1 site. And the “looking up” angle is worse than “looking down”. It’s an open question in the industry if the data can be trusted from these setups. You still have a lot of the complexity of maintaining them and exfiltrating the data.
If you want to just fly a plane… that’s expensive, you need to do it regularly, you still have a lot of “not actively monitored” time, etc.
In calibrating satellites getting folks like you to go out with sensors on the ground to send back well vetted data is an expensive and limiting factor. Much cheaper (and often preferred) to do as much as possible from space and do smart ground processing/data analysis to build confidence.
Monitoring from the ground using methane sensors that detect the gas directly requires a lot of human labor. You need to send people out to often remote locations to set up bulky tripods full of (still expensive) sensors. You need some expensive data backhaul because these places often don’t have cellular access. We were billed by the byte to have a 24/7 contract with uptime guarantees in some of these locations. One big issue is that the companies paying for self-monitoring want suspiciously low false positives (for legal compliance reasons). You have to work with the land owners if you expect them to let you put sensors on their sites. This limits who can access that data compared to a NGO running a satellite, and requires you to filter out “noise” that’s probably not noise to appease the customers. They’re also not very accurate at detecting source in that close distance. Gases tend to quickly rise above where a human can place a sensor array and the wind and environmental factors play a huge impact. Very few companies are willing to stand behind their physics modeling with any kind of SLA. The human cost also shouldn’t be understated: when my coworkers would go and set up these sensors they’d be dizzy for days/weeks due to the emitted gasses they breathed in, our employer basically couldn’t find affordable medical insurance for us.
If you want to use spectroscopy/cameras, you can do it from a (small) distance. But it’s fantastically expensive equipment that only can be used for 1 site. And the “looking up” angle is worse than “looking down”. It’s an open question in the industry if the data can be trusted from these setups. You still have a lot of the complexity of maintaining them and exfiltrating the data.
If you want to just fly a plane… that’s expensive, you need to do it regularly, you still have a lot of “not actively monitored” time, etc.