Joint Estimation of the Global Facility-Scale Oil-Gas Methane Emission Rate Distribution and Survey-Mode Detection...

We develop a detection-aware method to jointly estimate the facility-scale oil and gas (O&G) methane emission rate distribution from 16,294 detected and quantified O&G methane emission rates above ∼20 kg h^-1 from five high-resolution satellite instrument/data processing combinations in 2024 and 2025 (GHGSat/GHGSat, Tanager/Carbon Mapper, EMIT/Carbon Mapper, Sentinel-2/IMEO-MARS, Landsat/IMEO-MARS). We find that the emission rate distribution is well described by a log-normal model. Because our estimation method explicitly incorporates a model for each system's detection sensitivity, we simultaneously retrieve the facility-scale, condition-averaged "survey-mode" detection probability for each satellite system. We estimate the relative spatiotemporal coverage of each satellite system directly from their measured emission rates and quantify the effective spatial coverage by calculating the Earth Mover's Distance between each satellite system's plume detection locations and the Global Fuel Exploitation Inventory v3 O&G predictions, estimating that all satellite systems have global coverage of O&G emissions within sampling error. The O&G facility-scale emission rate distribution estimate is constrained by the largest collection of satellite detections to date, providing valuable information about the expected number of O&G emission events at different emission rates. Finally, the detection probability, and spatial and temporal coverage estimates are combined into a relative observation completeness metric that provides a compact summary for understanding the relative survey capabilities of different high-resolution satellite systems.