A Daytime Multisensor Satellite System for Global Gas Flaring Monitoring

Abstract

Natural gas flaring (GF) is a longstanding problem for the oil industry. Recent estimates indicate that this phenomenon has increased to levels recorded a full decade earlier. While in 2020 there was a decline in global GF due to COVID-19 pandemic, data suggest that GF continues to be a persistent issue, with solutions remaining difficult or uneconomical in certain countries. Nighttime satellite products are widely used to map and monitor GF affected areas, partially filling the general lack of information from oil companies and/or national reporting. In this work, we assess the potential of daytime infrared satellite observations at high spatial resolution from operational land imager (OLI) and multispectral instrument (MSI) sensors, respectively, onboard Landsat-8 (L8) and Sentinel-2 (S2) satellites, in monitoring GF activity. The normalized hotspot indices (NHI) algorithm is used for this purpose, testing its performance over six different GF sites. Results show the NHI capability in providing accurate information about GF-related thermal (e.g., 100% of detections offshore; up to 92% onshore), despite some limitations due to clouds and smoke. They open challenging scenarios regarding the possibility of quantifying the volume of emitted gas from daytime S2-MSI and L8-OLI data, integrating information from well-established nighttime operational systems.