The researchers, led by France's Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Environnement, said their findings partly explain why official inventories generally underestimate the volume of these emissions.
The satellites found hundreds of major methane releases linked to global oil and gas extraction activities.
The technology could be used to stop these releases, whether they are accidental or deliberate, to save the responsible countries billions of dollars.
A major contributor to climate change, methane has a global warming potential approximately 30 times higher than that of CO2 over a 100-year period. One quarter of anthropogenic emissions of this greenhouse gas originate in worldwide extraction of coal, oil and natural gas (of which methane is the main component).
The researchers have completed a global tally of the largest emissions of methane into the atmosphere by the fossil-fuel industry.
To obtain their data, the researchers methodically...