Google has partnered with the US Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) on a project using satellite imagery to identify and monitor sources of methane emissions.

Methane is the second most abundant greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide, produced from oil and gas, landfill, agriculture and other sources. It is extremely potent in the short term, having more than 80 times the warming power of CO2 in the first 20 years after reaching the atmosphere.

A major partnership will set out to track sources of methane emissions associated with oil and gas operations. It involves the EDF, Google, Harvard University, the Smithsonian and the New Zealand Space Agency, among others.

According to the EDF: “Methane from fossil fuel operations, agriculture and other industries has a massively outsized influence on the climate. It’s responsible for about 30% of today’s global warming. But finding these invisible emissions is tough, and we don’t have a clear picture of where they are or who’s responsible for them....