Environment Seminar: Bringing Space Down to Earth: Monitoring Industrial Greenhouse Gas Emissions with Small Satellites

ABSTRACT: In June 2016, GHGSat, Inc. launched “Claire”, a demonstration satellite designed to measure greenhouse gas emissions from targeted industrial facilities around the world. In 2019, we will be adding GHGSat-C1, our next generation satellite, and a prototype aircraft sensor to our system. Each of these will provide new and valuable data to help industrial operators better understand, control and ultimately reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. Industrial operators have several motivations for reducing their greenhouse gas emissions:

• Carbon pricing (and other forms of government regulation) drive operators to consider the legal and financial risk of their greenhouse gas emissions;
• Some greenhouse gases, such as methane, have significant health and safety implications; and
• Some greenhouse gases, again such as methane, have monetizable economic value.

Market analysts are also interested in greenhouse gas emissions from industrial facilities. For example, data on emissions can be linked with production volumes. Some market analysts are even interested in establishing various “green indexes” for environmental performance, potentially affecting market pricing of public company shares. We will discuss these factors, and GHGSat’s plans to help industrial operators address each of them.

BRIEF BIO: Stéphane Germain founded GHGSat in 2011 to answer a market need for consistent, high quality measurements of greenhouse gas emissions from industrial facilities worldwide. Mr. Germain has over 25 years of experience in aerospace engineering, project management, and business development. He has held senior management positions over a period of 10 years in both small and large Canadian aerospace companies. Prior to these positions, he was a consultant for several years with Bain & Company, a leading international strategy consulting firm, working for Fortune 500 companies in industries ranging from forestry to aerospace. At the start of his career, he worked as an engineer and project manager at Spar Aerospace. Mr. Germain graduated from Queen’s University (Canada) with a B.Sc. (Engineering Physics) in 1991 and a Masters in Business Administration from INSEAD (France) in 1994.