Orbio Earth Methane Intelligence Platform

Methane emissions from oil and gas assets are widely under-reported: Orbio Earth cites the IEA estimate that inventories underestimate energy-sector methane by about 70%, while methane regulation in the US and EU raises the regulatory and financial stakes for operators and their investors.

Orbio Earth's methane intelligence platform analyses imagery from public multispectral and hyperspectral satellites to detect methane plumes at oil and gas facilities worldwide. Its production pipelines use trained computer-vision models for Sentinel-2, Landsat 8/9 and EMIT, reading methane's absorption in shortwave-infrared bands, compared against earlier reference scenes for the multispectral sensors. Each detection is quantified with wind data, geolocated, attributed to ground assets and aggregated into asset-, operator- and company-level reports. The company states that it scans oil and gas facilities every couple of days, and its record reaches back to 2016.

Oil and gas operators use it to spot super-emitter events, time-box their duration under the US EPA Super-Emitter Program and trace persistent sources. Investors use it to benchmark portfolio companies, measure under-reporting of Scope 1 methane and estimate abatement costs. Customers choose the facilities, regions and companies to monitor and receive data through API integration or direct platform access, with daily, weekly or monthly reporting and alerts for critical emission events.

In two anonymised case studies Orbio Earth publishes, it identified emission events every couple of days over one month across a US operator's Permian Basin assets and reported which facilities were persistent emitters, and it estimated for an energy investor that one portfolio company's cost of abatement could represent 8% of its total net income. In Stanford University's single-blind controlled-release test of methane-sensing satellites (Sherwin et al., 2024), Orbio Earth detected every valid Sentinel-2 release. The platform was piloted with a data aggregator and a finance and consultancy user in an ESA demonstration project before commercial launch.