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Welcome to In-Orbit, the fortnightly podcast exploring how technology from space is empowering a better world.
[00:00:00] Dallas Campbell: Hello and welcome to In-Orbit, the podcast exploring how technology from space is empowering a better world, brought to you by the Satellite Applications Catapult. I'm your host, Dallas Campbell and in today's episode we're exploring greenhouse gases and the pivotal role of space based monitoring in understanding and mitigating their impact on the planet.
From orbiting satellites to cutting edge remote sensing techniques, we will dive into the fascinating world of space based monitoring and its crucial role in understanding the dynamics of our changing climate. Through groundbreaking research and collaboration, scientists are harnessing the power of space technology to track greenhouse gas emissions with unprecedented accuracy, paving the way for informed decision making and effective climate action.
Welcome to the show everyone. Welcome! It's lovely to have you in the studio. We've got, I'm going to go around the room just because you're going to probably hear a lot of voices today. We've got Luisa Doughty from the Satellite Application Catapult, nice to see you, you're the methane monitoring program lead. You have other hats as well, I know, I think basically you lead everything, there's like other things that you do, but...
[00:01:23] Luisa Doughty: I do quite a few things, yep, but that's one of the main things I'm doing at the moment, focusing on methane.
[00:01:27] Dallas Campbell: How is the methane?
[00:01:28] Luisa Doughty: A bit too much...
[00:01:29] Dallas Campbell: Bit too much?
[00:01:30] Luisa Doughty: In the atmosphere.
[00:01:31] Dallas Campbell: We'll get on to that. We've got Paul Green from the National Physical Laboratory, where all things are measured from, is how I think of things like the second. The reason we know a second is a second is because of Paul.
[00:01:43] Paul Green: Absolutely.
[00:01:44] Dallas Campbell: Paul defines all of our measurements and standard units. Just say yes, just say so. Yeah.
[00:01:51] Paul Green: Yeah, we look after the second, the kilogram, the amp, the volt, the mole.
[00:01:55] Dallas Campbell: I love the fact that these things need looking after. It's always appealed to me that we've got to look after the second, it's not going to look after itself. We've got Issabelle Crozier-Morris, who's the Innovation and Research Scientist for Earth Observation, Ordnance Survey. We love Ordnance Survey. It's one of those great brands, it's one of those great places. Tell us, what does that mean? What do you do there? What's your day to day work?
[00:02:16] Issabelle Crozier-Morris: So basically getting Earth Observation data and seeing whether it can be suitable for potential government customers. So lots of different aspects to it, looking at new data or concepts that Ordnance Survey might not have looked at before. Basically looking to the future, how can Ordnance Survey adapt and sort of bring in all these data sets together.
[00:02:35] Dallas Campbell: I try not to look to the future too much.
[00:02:37] Issabelle Crozier-Morris: It can be concerning!
[00:02:38] Dallas Campbell: I try and keep one foot back in the sort of mid 80s. Actually, that's the thing, when we think of Ordnance Survey, we think, I mean, most people, you know, maps and that's kind of it, but it's much more than that now, Ordnance Survey, isn't it?
[00:02:50] Issabelle Crozier-Morris: Yeah, significantly more. So we have our, obviously we have our maps which are the basis of the brand and the reputation, but there's so much more that we're doing involving things like new data sets are where I sit in the business. We also have lots of different sort of commercial factors that we're looking into.
[00:03:06] Dallas Campbell: Well, welcome. And we've got Blaine Tookey as well from a company, BP. I've heard of BP, I think.
[00:03:13] Blaine Tookey: yes, an international energy company.
[00:03:15] Dallas Campbell: Yes. I've been sort of interested that you're here because here we are talking about climate change and how we monitor greenhouse gases. I'm worried that you're going to get defensive and
[00:03:24] Blaine Tookey: No I don't think so and I think one of the delights of working for BP recently is its stance on climate change and it springs from the Paris Climate Accord in 2015.
[00:03:37] Dallas Campbell: Yeah.
[00:03:38] Blaine Tookey: For me, that sticks in my mind as the big statement about climate change across the world by organisations.
[00:03:44] Dallas Campbell: Yeah.
[00:03:44] Blaine Tookey: And from that BP worked with 10 other companies, we were leading protagonists to bring those companies together as the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative, which has been looking at technology developments about how the industry as a whole can address greenhouse gas emissions, CO2 and methane and we've been working with them, identifying new technologies and then you come to 2020 when BP reinvented itself from an oil and gas company to an energy major and made commitments around being net zero by 2050 and significant investments into renewable energy sources like biofuels, hydrogen, and driving down to net zero by 2050 and targets at 2030. So we made 10 aims that were publicly announced around what we're going to do around climate change and one of those was around methane, Aim Four, which is to monitor and measure methane at all our upstream oil and gas facilities by the end of 2023, which is just completed. So, you know, we're on a journey and very committed to reducing the effects energy has on climate change.
[00:04:55] Dallas Campbell: I mentioned it only because it's so newsworthy, you know, groups like Just Stop Oil and stuff. It's... we don't really hear very much in the public from the oil companies about what's actually going on. We tend to hear the kind of the shouting and the noise from groups like Just Stop Oil and I just briefly, cause I don't want to get into this now, but I'm interested in how you guys react to that and how you guys, what your kind of stance is.
[00:05:19] Blaine Tookey: Our stance is really that energy is essential for a satisfactory life. So there's this energy trilemma, as we call it. How can you provide secure energy, affordable energy, but low carbon energy? You know there's plenty of people that want everyone to go to low carbon straight away, but the economic, cost of that to certain parts of the community will be significant, you know, they won't be able to afford it. So it's about finding an affordable path to a low carbon future and that's what BP is all about. It's about plotting that journey. So I'm 100 percent behind reducing climate gases, but we've got to do it in a sustainable way.
[00:06:01] Dallas Campbell: I suppose it's that thing of, I'm interested, do you get frustrated when you hear the arguments from some climate activists who said, why don't you turn the taps off? Or do you feel there's a sort of lack of understanding of the science and the economics behind how it works?
[00:06:15] Blaine Tookey: I understand the need for publicity, because publicity is the engine that will drive change. Like anyone will get very frustrated when my train is stuck at the station because Just Stop Oil or whoever it is are protesting on the line and I'll, you know, think well these people probably turned up in their petrol driven cars and they live in houses that are fuelled by natural gas. So it's a bit hypocritical at some stage, but I do understand that if you're going to make a change, you often have to be very dramatic about it.
[00:06:47] Dallas Campbell: We might come back to this, I was going to save all that to the end, actually, I think it's really interesting and thank you for coming and being here. Thank you everyone for coming and being here. Actually, you mentioned Paris. We can go even further back to Montreal and if you think about the Montreal Protocols, which was, I think it was about CFCs, wasn't? We managed big change. We did manage to, you know, pass legislation, pass laws, and pretty much outlaw it. Even though I think, and we're going to talk about Earth Observation, I'm not sure which, who it was, but people have detected certain countries and certain organisations still using CFCs and be able to go actually let's stop we can see exactly what you're doing.
So maybe let's start with the science first, Paul, as our scientist we're going to talk about greenhouse gases, we're going to talk about monitoring greenhouse gases, but let's just start with the science first. We mentioned methane give us a little summary of greenhouse gases, what they are and why they're bad for the environment?
[00:07:39] Paul Green: Why they're important. Okay, so obviously there's two main greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide and methane, and they're both increasing their concentrations in the atmosphere in industrial periods over the last 200 years or so, and they effectively trap heat in the atmosphere and warm the planet, that's what they do. So they are the two main greenhouse gases, they're not anymore, and you know, I think the science is fairly clear that their concentrations have been growing over the last 100, 150 years, basically our fault.
[00:08:04] Dallas Campbell: And where are we? We, you know, we mentioned Paris again, paris was talking about 1.5 degrees, we've got to keep it within there. We've blown that, haven't we? We're long, we've blown that.
[00:08:15] Blaine Tookey: we hit it last year.
[00:08:15] Dallas Campbell: Luisa is shaking her head going like, oh, but what do we do? Do we admit to that? Should we admit to that and say, okay, we go for two? Because some people still say no 1.5, keep it alive or whatever the thing is.
[00:08:28] Luisa Doughty: It's a really good question. I think it looks like we've hit it, but I think the scientists are still number crunching in the background.
[00:08:34] Dallas Campbell: That's you, the the scientists number crunching.
[00:08:37] Luisa Doughty: The official kind of declaration that we've hit 1.5 is yet to come, but everyone has a different opinion and that's what makes this so complex. It's a global problem and the impacts aren't spread equally across the globe either. So it's very easy for someone sat here in the UK to say, Oh yeah, let's just aim for two, that's feasible. But someone who perhaps is sat somewhere else in the globe and is already suffering very directly from the impacts of climate change on a daily basis, we can do better and we should do better. But it's hard, it's really complex, it's really hard and we all need to come together and collaborate and I think that's the kind of difference from the Montreal Protocol to the Paris Agreement. It's a huge, global, complex problem.
[00:09:26] Dallas Campbell: Yeah, well that's a good point. It's sort of what we're dealing with now, orders of magnitude harder than Montreal, which is like, oh crikey, CFCs, those are really bad, ozone hole, let's sort it out and we kind of just did without anyone noticing, and it just sort of happened, and you know with a few exceptions.
[00:09:40] Paul Green: Yeah, but the CFC problem was a different problem in the sense of we were using a bad refrigerant. There were commercial alternatives available, so the fact that we said CFCs are bad, we swapped them for a different refrigerant and effectively the fridge industry carried on, you know what I mean?
[00:09:58] Dallas Campbell: Let's hear it for the fridge industry! Big fridge!
[00:10:01] Luisa Doughty: And the hole you could see in the sky went away. There was something tangible that you could see.
[00:10:06] Dallas Campbell: So I'm a bit off topic here I realise, but that's a really good point, that idea of it being tangible and somehow in a way, kind of climate change, it's just not tangible in that same way that, you know, the sun comes up and the sun comes down, sometimes it's hot, sometimes it's cold. It's quite hard for the human brain to grasp it.
[00:10:23] Issabelle Crozier-Morris: It's less easy to pinpoint, I think. With the CFCs you had one particular thing that, maybe there are slightly different types of it, but when you're looking at climate change as a whole, not only have you got multiple gases, carbon dioxide, methane, there's so many different sources of it, natural and human, that it's bringing those all together and figuring out where to start first.
[00:10:42] Dallas Campbell: Plus all the politics of it as well. I mean, it's almost as if it's complicated.
[00:10:46] Luisa Doughty: Maybe! That's the vibe isnt it!,
[00:10:50] Dallas Campbell: An ozone hole, it's like okay, the hole's that big and now it's that big. You can kind of measure things like really...
[00:10:56] Issabelle Crozier-Morris: You can measure the temperature, but it's less...
[00:10:57] Dallas Campbell: You can measure the temperature.
[00:10:58] Issabelle Crozier-Morris: It's just slightly different, isn't it?
[00:11:00] Dallas Campbell: Yeah, you can. Okay, well let's talk a little bit about monitoring. So this idea of monitoring, like how do we know where we are in terms of greenhouse gases, what is this of technology or the process involved of knowing where we are and in terms of temperatures and how much greenhouse gas is in the atmosphere?
[00:11:18] Issabelle Crozier-Morris: So there's different satellites that are orbiting Earth that can measure things like temperature. So there's satellites that can do land surface temperature. So from that it's slightly different, because when we're looking at climate change, we tend to do the, how many degrees is it above compared to pre-industrial period. But when we're sort of looking into the finer detail, that's satellites that can do the land surface temperature, so for example, that could be Landsat, which is one of the NASA satellites, Landsat 9 is the most recent and then you've also got satellites that are able to measure the greenhouse gases. So they're up, orbiting Earth, and they can look at the whole atmospheric column between the satellite and the land and then from that they're able to pick out either all of the greenhouse gases, like methane, or they can look at particular sources.
[00:12:04] Dallas Campbell: And how does that for lay people, I mean how does that work? So you've got one satellite or is there many satellites?
[00:12:11] Issabelle Crozier-Morris: Lots and lots of satellites, yeah.
[00:12:13] Dallas Campbell: Like 10?
[00:12:14] Issabelle Crozier-Morris: Hundreds.
[00:12:14] Dallas Campbell: Hundreds. So there's hundreds and hundreds of satellites up there and how do they measure? I mean, what's the gizmo on board that's saying, okay, there's this amount of methane or... and also how broad are we? Look, I mean, is it kind of... can we can spot like one cow that's burped and go, aha, that's...
[00:12:29] Paul Green: So there's different technologies, but fundamentally they all work by looking at the ratio of light reflected from the top of the atmosphere at a number of different wavelengths.
[00:12:39] Dallas Campbell: Yeah.
[00:12:39] Paul Green: So there's a few wavelengths around 1600 nanometers, particularly where methane absorbs and by basically measuring the ratio of the reflectance at one wavelength against the wavelength very close to it which has no methane, you can effectively calculate this column of the methane in the atmosphere. So they all generally work on a version of that.
Some zoom right in at the methane band, some use a much broader band and can map sort of less sensitively, but over a larger area. There's horses for course in terms of how you do it but fundamentally that's the underlying principles.
[00:13:12] Dallas Campbell: How broad is it? I mean presumably if there's methane in the air, it just sort of spreads out, so you can't particularly, you couldn't, oh, maybe you can. Can you tell where the methane is coming from?
[00:13:21] Blaine Tookey: Where it's being released it's going to be a hundred percent methane. So there'll be a significant concentration of methane at the point of release and it will dissipate over maybe kilometers. Which will then back to the background methane, which is about 2.5 ppm in the air. So where a release is, you'll see a very significant concentration of methane building up.
[00:13:45] Dallas Campbell: And these hundreds of satellites, are they covering the entire globe? I mean have we got basically all of Earth covered so we can see methane spikes depending on where they are?
[00:13:56] Issabelle Crozier-Morris: So basically there's different types of satellites. Some of them are, well they're always orbiting around the Earth and some of them are, we call it always on. So that means that they're able to capture data whenever they are orbiting around. There's other satellites which you get, you would task them. So if you want to look at a particular source of methane, then you could task the satellite to have a look.
The ones that are always on tend to have a lower spatial resolution, so how much of the ground is represented in one pixel. So from that you can look at this much bigger area, the, we call it diffuse sources where you, as Blaine was saying, where it sort of spreads out on a larger scale, or you have these other satellites which could pinpoint one particular source of methane. So we've got both that complement each other.
[00:14:37] Dallas Campbell: Just give us an idea of like, why this is important and how important it is to be able to kind of precisely monitor where the methane's coming from.
[00:14:47] Paul Green: So I think the, obviously the satellite era is relatively new, so if you go back to the sort of national reporting of methane, we literally count the cows, we count the paddy fields.
[00:14:56] Dallas Campbell: Was that how we... I mean, I don't know how we used to do it.
[00:14:59] Paul Green: Yeah exactly, those were mission factors and so effectively the way that is fundamentally reported country by country at the moment to the UNCCC is every country has to have a bottom up inventory of what they think they're emitting and that's what they give to the UN.
[00:15:11] Dallas Campbell: I think I didn't realise that. Is that how it works? So basically all the countries, we have to declare it to the UN and then it gets sort of, it gets sort of tallied up and presumably that's not, before satellites, that was not very accurate?
[00:15:23] Paul Green: So before satellites, so yeah if you think about more widely due to greenhouse gases in terms of CO2, you count the cars, you know, like the UK can work out how much petrol was sold in a year from the petrol pumps and you can make a sort of assessment as well you know, there's this much petrol that's been sold and this is probably how much emissions have come out of it. So from a sort of national level, you can do this bottom up inventory and if you think about it, all 200 odd countries in the world have to do this. So there's the more technologically advanced ones, but equally some of the less advanced ones.
[00:15:54] Dallas Campbell: Does anyone check their homework?
[00:15:55] Paul Green: Well, that's what satellites are doing.
[00:15:57] Dallas Campbell: Well, that yeah.
[00:15:58] Blaine Tookey: That's the question.
[00:15:59] Dallas Campbell: Are you guys, not you personally, are you kind of like climate cops? Like is that the sort of idea?
[00:16:05] Paul Green: You don't get hats.
[00:16:06] Luisa Doughty: I think methane's become a really hot topic in the last few years.
[00:16:11] Dallas Campbell: See, I don't.
[00:16:12] Luisa Doughty: A literal hot topic.
[00:16:12] Dallas Campbell: For you guys it has, but I think most people we hear about CO2.
[00:16:15] Luisa Doughty: Yeah, we talk a lot about CO2. Methane is a much more potent gas in terms of its warming properties, but it also has a much shorter life in the atmosphere, so it's actually an area where there's quite a high potential for us to make a change by controlling the amount of methane that ends up in the atmosphere. That doesn't mean that we need to stop, you know, Blaine said we're not going to stop extracting tomorrow, but what's also happening at the same time is that we're starting to talk about regulating and governments, you know, the UK, other governments, the EU, are starting to look at what does regulation look like in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. Very complicated because you can't see them, they don't respect national boundaries. So satellites present an opportunity for organisations, industry, to understand their emissions and to take steps to improve their performance, but also for governments, regulatory bodies etc, to be understanding of verifying is reporting. The reporting that we're seeing, is it correct? Is it accurate? Where are the issues? Where might we need to intervene? So it's quite a timely point in time for both industry and kind of policy makers to be working hand in hand to create a system that works for everyone where, you know, an organization like BP can work collaboratively with others and say, look, yeah, we've had a problem, but we've dealt with it and that can be verified and everyone carries on.
[00:17:46] Dallas Campbell: Maybe we should just pause and just in terms of methane, who are the main culprits? We should maybe go through some of the areas of industry or agricultural transport. Where are the problem areas with...?
[00:17:56] Luisa Doughty: Yeah, so with the program that we're working on at the moment, there are kind of a few key sectors, oil and gas, mining, waste, so waste management, obviously naturally occurring methane typically comes from decomposition, be it kind of organic matter in water or kind of ground systems. So the waste that we produce also produces methane and then there are agriculture, so large scale cattle farming for example, which is not so much a problem here in the UK, but in the Americas it's a big problem and then there are other sectors, but those are kind of the large four.
[00:18:34] Dallas Campbell: And so the idea is to get clearer data, more precise data and then action hopefully, we'll be able to, we'll be able to follow on. I'm just interested in the sort of technology, you talked about the sort of satellites and its sort of light detecting, just over the, you know, we've seen a huge revolution in satellite technology in the last decade. Just give us some kind of idea of what it was like a decade ago, where we are now, and what it's going to be like in the future. Are we going to be able to sort of pinpoint a single cow or...
[00:19:03] Blaine Tookey: Well, a decade ago there was hugely expensive satellites that cost billions of dollars, with very accurate instruments on them, but they were not very specific in being able to pinpoint where emissions were happening because they had this very large spatial footprint that they were measuring and what we've seen since then, over the last 10 years, is the advent of very cheap, Low Earth Orbit satellites that can be put up for hundreds of thousands of dollars and not billions. They might not last as long, they might not be as accurate, but you can keep refreshing the technology, refreshing the satellite. So we've got this explosion in instruments being flown, in low earth orbit, giving us quick and fast view of what's happening on the earth. So that's what's happening and that's what's changing the game because it's giving us better spatial view of what's happening to emissions.
[00:20:02] Dallas Campbell: Yeah and are we going to see kind of results because of this, do you think? It's like, okay we've got better data now from these satellites, are things going to change or are companies, countries, just going to go...
[00:20:13] Blaine Tookey: Well, what's, happening now...
[00:20:15] Dallas Campbell: ...who cares?
[00:20:15] Blaine Tookey: ...is we can see large emissions that we couldn't see before.
[00:20:19] Dallas Campbell: Yeah.
[00:20:19] Blaine Tookey: Previously as...
[00:20:21] Dallas Campbell: So you can name and shame, you can go...
[00:20:22] Blaine Tookey: People reported, you know, companies will say, these are my CO2 emissions, these are my methane emissions and a lot of them were calculations. Now calculations won't wash if a satellite goes over and sees a big emission.
[00:20:34] Dallas Campbell: Got it, yes, I understand.
[00:20:35] Blaine Tookey: People can start asking the question, whose emission is that? What's happening? Why? And once you start going through that cycle...
[00:20:42] Dallas Campbell: That's interesting.
[00:20:43] Blaine Tookey: ...people people then will start actioning it.
[00:20:45] Luisa Doughty: And that's important at the kind of national regulatory level, but it's also important for large organisations who have a large supply chain. They can monitor across their supply chain without having to deploy as many ground based resources, but it's still important to be working with different types of data. So we're not saying that satellite data are the solution for everything, there's still a need to combine them with those ground based sensor data, etc.
[00:21:13] Dallas Campbell: But you, so ground tree things as well, so you could see something in your satellite and they, oh, let's go and check...
[00:21:18] Luisa Doughty: There's a leak.
[00:21:19] Dallas Campbell: ...that factory out.
[00:21:20] Luisa Doughty: We can understand it and fix it.
[00:21:23] Blaine Tookey: Satellite is still quite limited in that it can only see the large emitters, almost what we call the super emitters. However, the super emitters are sort of 80 percent of the problem, if you like, there's the 80 20 rule. That's where, at the moment, if we can address the super emitters, we'll get a significant reduction. But then you need to go down at a lower level and at the moment satellite can't go below something, probably about 100 kilograms an hour type is a good number.
[00:21:49] Dallas Campbell: Hundred, just explain that, a hundred kilograms an hour?
[00:21:53] Blaine Tookey: A methane release at 100 kg an hour, you might just see it with a satellite.
[00:21:59] Dallas Campbell: Yeah.
[00:21:59] Blaine Tookey: Much below that you probably won't see it, above that then you know the more it is the more the clearer it will become but large emissions, you know, so for a company like BP and other responsible operators, our emissions are below that level. So you, from satellite, you look over our facility and you won't see anything.
[00:22:19] Dallas Campbell: So you're not gonna see anything. So you guys... okay.
[00:22:21] Blaine Tookey: But it doesn't mean we don't care about, but we have to monitor it at the moment...
[00:22:24] Dallas Campbell: I see.
[00:22:25] Blaine Tookey: ...with ground instruments to see what our emissions are and report them. We had a hundred satellite images flown by GHGSat over the last year...
[00:22:35] Dallas Campbell: We're gonna talk about GHGsat.
[00:22:37] Blaine Tookey: ...over our facilities, saw nothing.
[00:22:41] Dallas Campbell: And is that just because the technology isn't quite there yet?
[00:22:44] Blaine Tookey: It's not quite there yet.
[00:22:46] Dallas Campbell: Are we going to, okay, ten years time, will it be there?
[00:22:49] Blaine Tookey: I don't want to say it isn't useful because super emitters are the things we need to go after now and if you can see these large emissions...
[00:22:56] Dallas Campbell: Who's a super emitter? Give me an example of a super emitter.
[00:22:59] Paul Green: There's been some examples in the news in the last six months or so. Well, there was one only a few days ago in, I think it was Kazakhstan, where there was a blowout of well...
[00:23:07] Dallas Campbell: Right.
[00:23:08] Paul Green: Um, And it's been emitting, I think it's 120,000 tonnes of methane over six months, that's what it was saying. So my basic math suggests that's like 20 tonnes an hour.
[00:23:17] Issabelle Crozier-Morris: The Biggest ever.
[00:23:18] Paul Green: Coming out.
[00:23:19] Dallas Campbell: And is that significant to the, I mean, I think of things like that and I think of things like Nord Stream, when that got blown up, there was a huge, I seem to remember in the news, I don't know if it was methane or, yeah... it was methane? But are those sorts of big events, will satellites be able to detect those?
[00:23:34] Paul Green: Yeah. So those, when you're talking tonnes an hour, then almost all the satellites can see that as in the one, the big mappers or the taskers. So in some sense, I think the satellites and particularly the array of satellites we have at the moment, they're trying to solve a number of problems. So one of them is, you know, some of the more responsible oil and gas companies, maybe like Blaine here who are effectively using them to check that they haven't got leaks they're not aware of, whereas in things like the one that was in the news last week, effectively they've been leaking this blowout for six months from somewhere in the middle of Kazakhstan, which they've completely denied a problem
[00:24:13] Dallas Campbell: Oh no.
[00:24:13] Paul Green: But it took things like the satellites to say, look it is there, it is happening.
[00:24:17] Dallas Campbell: Yeah.
[00:24:17] Paul Green: We've got the measurements over six months...
[00:24:18] Dallas Campbell: We can see it.
[00:24:19] Paul Green: ...and we've seen it.
[00:24:20] Dallas Campbell: It's a bit like having a dash cam on your car. It's like, well, you know, you can argue about it, but...
[00:24:24] Paul Green: They capped it at Christmas and the satellites keep going back and now they're showing that it was capped at Christmas and there's been nothing since!
[00:24:31] Dallas Campbell: Right, that's interesting. I wanna talk a little bit about, you know, you talked about hundreds of satellites, whose are these satellites? I mean, I remember hearing Al Gore talking about Trace, I think it was, which seems to be a similar thing of looking. Is that a group of companies together looking at the Earth's atmosphere and sharing data, Trace, do you know what that is? Does anyone know what that is? Maybe I dreamt it.
[00:24:53] Issabelle Crozier-Morris: Yeah, I have heard of it, yeah.
[00:24:56] Blaine Tookey: From NASA and for European Space Agency, and they're operating a lot of the big ones. But it's all the smaller ones are coming in from significant numbers of commercial operators that were non-governmental.
[00:25:07] Dallas Campbell: Well, that's my question. So it's not just governments putting these satellites. It's... so you mentioned GHGsat. Who wants to have a go at explaining GHGsat?
[00:25:16] Issabelle Crozier-Morris: So, GHGsat's a commercial company that started in Canada, and they've got bases around the world now, and they have been launching high resolution satellites to measure methane. They also measure... launching a satellite that will measure carbon dioxide and so they've got, I think it's nine satellites that measure methane now, but I mentioned earlier that there's some satellites which are always on and there's some satellites that you can task. So GHGsat, they have satellites which you can task, so because of that they can look at individual, say industrial sites and monitor those. So they've got an aim to monitor, I think it's every single industrial site in the world by 2026.
[00:25:55] Dallas Campbell: What does that... what do you mean every industrial site in the world? Like, not every industrial...
[00:26:00] Issabelle Crozier-Morris: They mean every...
[00:26:02] Dallas Campbell: That's...
[00:26:03] Issabelle Crozier-Morris: So basically one thing that's key with this is you have the technology to measure methane at these sites, but how do you know where these sites are? And that's where someone like Ordnance Survey can come in and location data is really key for this because you need to be able to know that, okay, say you've got this 30 meter pixel and you're looking at methane in that site, well what's actually there? And when you're looking at that level of detail you need highly detailed location mapping. So in the UK there's been examples, GHGsat have measured two polluted events in the UK and one of them was in the news recently and Ordnance Survey was able to put... What was it?
It was a leak in a gas power plant and it was someone who happened to be, I think they were a PhD student and they were working in the area, smelt gas on the ground and reported it to GHGsat and they measured it.
[00:26:48] Dallas Campbell: Really?
[00:26:48] Issabelle Crozier-Morris: Yeah, it was in a BBC News article recently.
[00:26:50] Dallas Campbell: That's amazing. So he just, he smelt gas. Rather than calling the gas board...
[00:26:55] Issabelle Crozier-Morris: I'm sure that was involved as well. Let me call the satellite, yeah! I said, but then combining the data meant that with Ordnance Survey's location mapping, because especially in Great Britain we have this really highly detailed data. We were able to pinpoint that, oh, this is your location. Combining that data together.
[00:27:10] Dallas Campbell: Yeah, that's... so let me just get this straight. So all these satellites up there, some of them are owned by governments, some of them are owned by private companies. Where does the UK fit into all this? Where does the catapult fit into all of this? What's your relationship with all this stuff?
[00:27:25] Luisa Doughty: Yeah, I mean, so we have, we specifically have the program working with GHGsat on providing access to a subset of their archive data to UK based organisations for R&D purposes. So we're UKSA funded and so the UK government have made this data set available with the view of looking at how GHGsat data, but also more broadly satellite data, can be integrated into methodologies, tools and systems for monitoring greenhouse gas emissions for organisations or other bodies to monitor, report and verify the emissions of their operations.
[00:28:09] Dallas Campbell: Is this all part of our net zero by 2050?
[00:28:13] Luisa Doughty: So it's all linked to those targets, you know, to the nationally determined contributions that came out of the Paris Agreement to net zero by 2030, 2050, whichever kind of timeline you've set yourself. But also I think there's a broader role for the UK and it'll be interesting to hear Paul's view on this. I think a lot of organisations and countries around the world are looking to the UK for the standards, setting the standards.
[00:28:38] Dallas Campbell: That's what I was, yeah, thank you for bringing that up, because are we well placed to have a good leadership role in this? It seems like leadership is the thing that quite often we're lacking in this.
[00:28:49] Paul Green: So I think there's, obviously everything that's just been said is absolutely accurate. But I think the other thing to think about from the UK point of view is we've always started from a very strong academic point of view in terms of use of Earth Observation data.
[00:29:02] Dallas Campbell: Yeah.
[00:29:02] Paul Green: So we've got some really key universities that are actually leading the world in terms of using particularly the space agency owned satellites to understand what's going on with things like methane globally. Now on top of that, it's really then sort of leveraging that information and understanding how you then apply that to this to sort of more applications in terms of emissions reductions in terms of future emissions from oil and gas. I think in terms of the UK, we start with quite a lot of knowledge in sort of climate services and that sort of stuff. But at the same time, I guess from a sort of finance point of view, things, so a lot of government legislation has gone into trying to make us world leaders in terms of how you regulate these things. So there is legislation out there to get corporations to report their emissions and it's been led by the Stock Exchange and effectively the finance markets are effectively saying we need to understand your emissions to understand whether you're a good bet for investment into the future. So when you bring that in, effectively there's a real driver from a sort of financial market to actually know know what you're doing and reduce that over time. Now, if you combine those sort of things together, then there's a real natural place to try and put standards into how do you report that data.
[00:30:15] Dallas Campbell: Right, so when you talk about markets, everything is being led by the markets, is that what you're saying? And therefore we have to make it fit, maybe attractive to the markets?
[00:30:27] Paul Green: I would say it was a very good idea that to make corporate reporting of greenhouse gases effectively required if you're part of the stock exchange, but equally the American stock exchange have done the same thing. Effectively it creates the, well, the carrot and the stick, whichever one you think it is, to actually look, you know, report it, report your emissions accurately and therefore you need accurate data for that, but also show how you are trying to reduce your emissions year on year towards what's on national net zero targets. But to be able to report that information reliably and with confidence year on year then clearly there needs to be some sort of standards on how you report that data, depending where you get that data from, if you get, you know. Your data from company X or company Y how do you know that they're compatible how do you know that if you get your data from company X this year and they say oh he's done really well and you've ommitted X and then next year you get it from company Y and they go i'll give you a different number...
[00:31:18] Dallas Campbell: God, I'm really glad I don't have to sort that out. It's just like a massive hassle.
[00:31:21] Paul Green: Is the answer that you've actually emitted more, or is it just that the company you've got the data from was processed in a different way, or done something different with it and is it at the basis of the system?
[00:31:31] Dallas Campbell: And presumably you then have to scale this up internationally. Does everyone agree that this is going to be the international standard? And presumably, let me guess, no one agrees.
[00:31:39] Luisa Doughty: To pick up on kind of Paul's point around the financial markets, what they're really looking at is they need to understand that when they're making an investment, it's a responsible investment and that the data that's being used to inform their investment is accurate and so having standards, if the UK can kind of demonstrate its leadership in setting those standards, which we have a history of, through MPL and others, we are gonna, I think, see other countries looking at what we are doing to inform their approach. Now there will always be outliers and...z
[00:32:14] Dallas Campbell: Carrot rather than stick. People will go, Oh the UK's done a really good job and that works, we're going to do that rather than...
[00:32:20] Paul Green: If we can show that it works for the UK, then obviously the idea is those can be adopted internationally and we can all work together and I think this is why we're getting involved in standards at NPL because we've been involved in setting standards, you know, measurement science and standards is basically what we do a lot of the time. But we've been setting the standards for in situ monitoring of methane, so actually like on site, going on site and taking measurements. So really moving it to then setting the standards for satellite derived methane is a natural progression of what we do.
[00:32:49] Dallas Campbell: What about, I mean countries like China, for example, countries like Russia, big countries that we have slightly difficult political relations with, you know, are we monitoring their methane? Is there anything we can do? You know what are the relations with countries like that? I mean, I'm just saying, it all sounds nice, but it's just like, okay well, talking about Europe and the UK and America, but it's, like you say, climate...
[00:33:13] Luisa Doughty: I think that's the role of COP of the UN. The UN and the COPS and organisations are feeding, you know, their knowledge and their intelligence into the COP, be they in the UK, the US,, et cetera. These satellites can monitor emissions from those countries and you know, if an organisation has supply that comes from within those countries, they can monitor those parts of their supply chain and perhaps use that to inform their decision making around continued investment in those geographies, which is quite an important one, like the example from the news recently in Kazakhstan, if that plant was within your supply chain, you might be asking yourself about their compliance to your kind of contractual expectations.
[00:33:57] Dallas Campbell: We just had COP 28, haven't we? And you were in Dubai. Talking about ground truth, you on the ground at COP, dealing with all these different countries, what was your sort of sense of, did you come away going, yeah, actually we can sort this out, or did you come away going, crikey, this is...
[00:34:10] Issabelle Crozier-Morris: I mean, for me personally, so I was a volunteer of the UK Space Agency, representing the UK Space Sector and talking to lots of people that were coming to visit the stand that we had and what I found was that people were a lot more open and had more knowledge than I was necessarily expecting from lots and lots of different sectors. So I had spoke to lots of investors and sort of energy companies as well, who were very interested in what the UK was doing. So kind of going back to that point, I think the UK is sort of setting an example, has been and will be because we had a event that we organised which Paul was one of the presenters on. So this was the UK Space Agency looking at methane standards and that was, I feel, the start of the conversation because there were so many different people there who could come and attend.
[00:34:53] Dallas Campbell: It does seem to be something we're really good at, is this idea of standards and legal frameworks that people tend to look at the UK going, okay well, these guys seem to have a...
[00:35:01] Paul Green: We're quite good at bringing people together.
[00:35:02] Dallas Campbell: Yeah.
[00:35:03] Paul Green: Trying to put them on the same footing. Maybe it's a very British thing. So yeah, no, absolutely. The event that Isabel was talking about, yeah, it was fantastic!
[00:35:11] Dallas Campbell: This was in Dubai?
[00:35:12] Paul Green: In Dubai, we had had representatives from all the major space agencies, but also from the UAE as well. It was very interesting to understand what they wanted to do in this field too. But yeah, generally everybody was very positive and trying to move things in the right direction. I think ultimately, COP is a massive event.
[00:35:30] Dallas Campbell: My worry is that people hear about it once a year, we hear some number, COP and then a number 27, 28 and then it's in the news for about 10 minutes and then it drops out and nobody's quite outside of this world really can understand what's going on.
I
[00:35:41] Blaine Tookey: think it's quite positive in that it is driving change. I mean, what is coming out of it is initiatives that are bringing organisations together to collaborate and change things. So for COP28 from the oil and gas industry, there was the oil and gas decarbonisation charter that came out.
[00:35:57] Dallas Campbell: Right.
[00:35:57] Blaine Tookey: That's 52 companies have signed up to this and it's about committing to zero flaring, by 2030 and, or near zero, let me get it right. Near zero.
[00:36:09] Dallas Campbell: Just remind us what flaring is.
[00:36:10] Blaine Tookey: Flaring is where you burn off residual gas from a production facility.
[00:36:14] Dallas Campbell: You see that flame out of a chimney.
[00:36:16] Blaine Tookey: And that residual gas will have CO2 and it will have methane, unburnt methane in it and so reducing that to near zero by 2030 will be a big difference and near zero methane as well, i.e. getting rid of cold venting where you just vent it into the air. So those commitments are going to make a difference and everyone signing up to it means companies are going to move towards that and one other initiative out of that was that the companies like BP, Exxon, Shell have agreed because we're further along our journey in reducing these emissions, to mentor companies that aren't and so BP are actually going to work with SoCal in Azerbaijan, which is the next COP actually, COP 29, and show them what we're doing, have workshops with them, give them technical assistance. So their journey to reduce methane is just two years, rather than how long it might have taken other companies to get there. So real positive things are coming out of these COPs that may not be regulation, we're not hitting them with a stick, but we're getting people together, we're giving publicity to it and change is happening because of that.
[00:37:20] Dallas Campbell: Yeah. The problem is it doesn't hit the mainstream news of quite a lot of this stuff. So people are kind of unaware of what's going on and there is stuff going on, I think it's important to highlight that. I'm interested as well in just, let's just briefly talk about innovation. So you talked about satellites were big and expensive to launch and we say this all the time, getting anything mass into Low Earth orbit costs money and cost, you know, and it's expensive and uses a lot of fuel. Satellites have got smaller. What's the next kind of innovation? How are we going to make earth observation technology, particularly atmospheric gas monitoring even better? Is there things that are coming along?
[00:37:56] Issabelle Crozier-Morris: I think one of the aims would be more precise data. So I know there's more satellites that are due to be launched and I know Paul in particular and Blaine have some knowledge on this. But I do think that's the big change, that when we have these satellites that are always on, their spatial resolution's a lot lower, and you've got the commercial satellites where the spatial resolution's higher. So if we have more opportunities and more examples of these satellites going round, then we're able to collect more data.
[00:38:21] Dallas Campbell: So more, so are you saying there'll be more companies like...
[00:38:25] Issabelle Crozier-Morris: Like GHGsat, there's, Kiros is one of another commercial organisations.
[00:38:29] Dallas Campbell: there's going to be more companies. So basically, presumably you want to set up one of these companies because there must be value in that data somewhere along the line?
[00:38:36] Issabelle Crozier-Morris: Yeah, potential venture for someone else.
[00:38:37] Dallas Campbell: So more companies and better satellites, better equipment, more precise?
[00:38:41] Blaine Tookey: To what Isabel said, it's about getting better spatial resolution, because the challenge at the moment with satellites is that you get one snapshot in time when the satellite goes over, gives you one picture for a millisecond and that frequency of revisit at any point on earth tends to be 10, 14, 20 days.
[00:39:02] Dallas Campbell: Oh right, okay.
[00:39:02] Blaine Tookey: Okay. and then you might have a weather problem, so it'll go over 10 days later and it can't see anything because of weather.
[00:39:08] Dallas Campbell: Yeah.
[00:39:09] Blaine Tookey: And then, as I said before, the limit at the moment is about 100, 200 kilograms an hour. So we had tried to get some images with satellite over one of our facilities. We took 15 satellite images and we got one successful hit. So that's one of your 150 days. So the innovations that are changing are one, the spatial resolution is going to come down from 20, 30 meters down to 5 meters, so you can really see exactly where it's happening. The frequency, there's a company called Airmo launching in 2025 that are promising four revisits a day, now that is transformational really in terms of one every 10-15 days.
[00:39:47] Dallas Campbell: And how does it do that? Does it just go faster or like what's the, how does it do... if it took days beforehand, how can it suddenly do it in four in a day, four visits in a day?
[00:39:56] Blaine Tookey: Well it'll be the number they have and it'll be the orbits they'll put them.
[00:40:00] Dallas Campbell: Right.
[00:40:01] Blaine Tookey: So other innovations is going into Very Low Earth orbit, so then you can get a better spatial because you're closer to the Earth, so you can get better spatial, but they degrade quickly, so they might, burn up after three years.
[00:40:13] Dallas Campbell: Right.
[00:40:14] Blaine Tookey: But you just put more up. The beauty of these Low Earth Orbit satellites now is they're so cheap that people are just launching hundreds at a time and OK, so if 10 percent don't work or 50 percent burn up after three years, you just keep launching more. So this is the innovations that are happening, much more frequent launching, lower cost, getting better spatial and better spectrum.
[00:40:36] Dallas Campbell: And the results will be better data, more accurate data, and the results of that will be, suddenly everything will be alright. Yeah, we've fixed, that's climate change done, sorted that out.
[00:40:46] Blaine Tookey: If you can't monitor it and meter it, you can't manage it and so it's all about answering that question.
[00:40:50] Dallas Campbell: Yeah.
[00:40:51] Blaine Tookey: What's going on accurately? Who's releasing what? And once you know that, then you can address it, you can manage it, you can talk to the people, why are you releasing X amount and then things happen.
[00:41:03] Luisa Doughty: In terms of other innovations, I think as well, kind of the ones we're talking about a lot of the catapult are from a kind of purely technological perspective, looking at novel sensor technology. So are there other ways, other types of sensors that we could develop that would help us to monitor these gases or other natural systems which increasingly, you know, we're talking a lot about climate change today. Biodiversity is another massive crisis that we're facing, so are there novel sensors that we can develop to monitor climate change and biodiversity so that we... and data informs the decisions that we make around how we manage our planet and that's really what the satellites are providing us with is that kind of huge data set that can help us to understand what's going on so that we can make better decisions in whichever area, you know, we all have different pools as well.
[00:41:55] Dallas Campbell: Do you mean having like, sensors that do more than one thing? Like a sensor that rather than just having a sensor that just does, that does methane, it does... what do you mean when you say that measures biodiversity?
[00:42:07] Luisa Doughty: I mean, that's, there are many different ways of measuring biodiversity and it's a big question at the moment with the kind of task force for nature financial disclosures coming out. We need to understand what needs to be measured and measuring biodiversity from space is very complicated because, you know, you can't count the number of frogs which has typically been an indicator species of ecosystem performance, based on ground data. You can't measure them from space. Maybe one day we will be able to, I doubt it. But from a novel sensor perspective, are there types of sensors that are perhaps used in different applications at the moment that could be tweaked to work for greenhouse gases or as an indicator of biodiversity in a forest landscape, for example?
[00:42:57] Blaine Tookey: Yeah, vegetation and water is a big thing as well. So water positivity is a...
[00:43:02] Luisa Doughty: Yeah.
[00:43:02] Blaine Tookey: ...is what companies like BP want to improve, good use of water, and that's where satellite can make a huge difference, understanding what's happening to water within the world.
[00:43:13] Issabelle Crozier-Morris: And you have to take it habitat by habitat as well. So something like peatlands, if a peatland's unhealthy, it will release methane. If it's healthy, it won't release methane and it will store carbon dioxide. So you've got things like that where it's difficult to monitor it, but what data sets can you bring together to be able to look at habitats like peatlands?
[00:43:32] Dallas Campbell: And well, with these kind of vast data sets that we're going to have, I mean things that, you know, obviously we talk a lot about AI, presumably as AI gets better and more sophisticated, that will have an effect on the kind of results we get.
[00:43:44] Blaine Tookey: I mean, certainly thanks to AI is why we can at the moment start seeing methane and CO2 within the existing satellites, because the images and the instruments are great, but they're improved by artificial intelligence, improved by getting lots of data and then being able to pick out what's in that data that we couldn't pick up before?
[00:44:03] Dallas Campbell: Yes, so we can see clearer. All these things just let, presumably just let us see clearer and better.
[00:44:08] Paul Green: Just thinking, so in terms of how AI is being used at the moment, so for instance, like Tropomy, which is one of these global mappers, it takes millions and millions of images every day of the year over the Earth. Now, if it was left to a human to go through and look for these little spikes of methane, well, you just couldn't keep up. So the point is, AI is being used to identify potential areas of interest, which then highlight the... inform the scientists who then go and look a bit more deeply, and then maybe go and task one of these other satellites to go and have a look at it in more detail. So that's where the AI sort of side of things is really being, it's really helpful at the moment. I think in terms of satellites, technologies for the future, we talk about biodiversity, we talk about peatlands, in reality it's the new hyperspectral images that are the... so this is an imager that rather than just looking at a wavelength that measures methane or one that just looks at something that measures clouds or whatever, effectively the satellite measures all the wavelengths from across the visible into the infrared at very small spectral resolutions so effectively you get the full spectrum of the reflected solar light and then different parts of that spectrum tell you about different processes going on in the atmosphere on the ground. So one sensor could be used for peatland, but also used for methane, but also be used for biodiversity, and it's the fact that now getting many more of these hyperspectral images up there and therefore have the revisit and the coverage that we've talked about in some of the other things. In reality, that's where you effectively collect all the, effectively all the data that's available to you in the electromagnetic spectrum and then go and have a look at see what you can find.
[00:45:39] Dallas Campbell: It's mind blowing, isn't it? It's mind blowing now, it's going to be more mind blowing in ten years, twenty years.
[00:45:44] Luisa Doughty: And kind of bring it back to the original, what innovation is required? We've talked a lot about innovation within the technology part of the system and there's obviously technology is only one part of every system and there needs to be financial innovation as well in terms of affordability and pricing models of the data to make them attractive to a potential user and drive uptake. There needs to be the right regulatory legislative framework around how the data are used. You need the skills, you need the education system to be enabling as the data become more innovative, people can use them.
[00:46:23] Dallas Campbell: We tend to think, oh, technology will solve all our problems, but it's technology plus education, plus politics, plus regulation, plus everything else.
[00:46:34] Luisa Doughty: Social.
[00:46:34] Dallas Campbell: Social.
[00:46:35] Luisa Doughty: Dynamics,
[00:46:37] Dallas Campbell: Podcasts.
[00:46:38] Luisa Doughty: Podcasts.
[00:46:38] Dallas Campbell: That kind of thing. Paul, there is some upcoming satellite news, I think, isn't there?
[00:46:44] Paul Green: There is, so it's actually quite an exciting time at the moment because there's two new satellite missions that are going to launch in the next couple of months. So, there's MethaneSat that's going to go up I believe in March this year and this is, I always get the name wrong, this is one of the philanthropic missions and they've just teamed up with Google to do a lot of their image data processing. But effectively, we've talked about the, area mappers, so the always on map, globe ones and then we've talked about the task points source missions that maybe look at a sort of 10 kilometer square, but a very high spatial resolution. Well MethaneSat sits in the middle of that. So it's looking more like 200 kilometer square images. So we can look at effectively oil and gas production basins rather than looking at individual sites. So it's quite an interesting and very exciting mission that sort of helps to fill some of those gaps between the very small detail that's things like Greenhouse Gas Sat can do, but then the large mappers that things like Tropomy can do and alongside that, we have Carbon Mapper that's also going up in the next month or two, I believe. Now that's a collaboration between JPL in California and Planet Labs. But again, that's another one of these hyperspectral images, but with a particular interest in looking at the methane bands and again, so I think Blaine talked about it earlier in terms of, it's really about sort of combining these data, from different satellites to sort of understand what's going on and. There's two really interesting new sensors that can go very quickly.
[00:48:06] Dallas Campbell: Great!
[00:48:08] Blaine Tookey: Yeah, and I think that there's a third one at the end of the year, PIXEL, which is an Indian startup, launching a shortwave infrared satellite and the interesting thing about that is that the spatial resolution is down to five meters, which we just haven't had from anything else other than World View 3, but that has a limited spectral capability.
[00:48:28] Dallas Campbell: Blaine, just give us an idea about how involved energy companies are in this kind of work. I mean, a lot, you know, for a lot of the public energy companies are just seen as like energy companies, evil, bad. Just from your point of view, what are you guys doing to sort of mitigate the problems with fossil fuels?
[00:48:45] Blaine Tookey: I said at the beginning, what we're doing ourselves around our goal to be net zero by 2050 and have targets in between so... and reducing our own energy production in favour of renewables. So that's a company goal that BP has, but one of our goals is to advocate for the industry and across the industry. So getting involved in UN missions, particularly the oil and gas methane partnership.
[00:49:09] Dallas Campbell: So actively involved in what we've been discussing today in terms of...
[00:49:13] Blaine Tookey: Yes, we've been instrumental in writing some of the level one to five rules about where company get accreditation for their performance and level four is monitoring methane at all of your facilities in real time. That's a gold standard, we're a gold standard, lots of companies are claimed to be gold standard and that sort of publicity, those sort of regulations and rules that it's almost people are signing up to, because they want to, because they want to be good companies, are things that are driving the industry to be cleaner and get to that net zero quicker than they would otherwise.
[00:49:48] Dallas Campbell: Guys, thank you so much for coming in and chatting about it's really, I honestly, it is mind blowing I think it's one of the things about you know, you talk about space to the general public a lot of people, oh they're sending rockets up and that's polluting, which it is, but I also think you wouldn't even know about climate change if it wasn't for space and actually having satellites looking at Earth Observation.
[00:50:10] Paul Green: No.
[00:50:11] Luisa Doughty: Truth.
[00:50:11] Issabelle Crozier-Morris: Yeah, agreed.
[00:50:12] Paul Green: With the mapping quality of satellites, you can see everywhere, there are no boundaries. I can see what's in my country or the one next door, it really gives us a truly global picture of what's going on with climate.
[00:50:22] Blaine Tookey: I mean the beauty of it is it's unencumbered by all the problems you get on earth when you're trying to monitor something, where you have to do risk assessments, you have safety, you have people, you have maintenance, you have theft.
[00:50:32] Dallas Campbell: People, that's the problem. People's the problem. We just get rid of the people. Yeah.
[00:50:35] Blaine Tookey: It's just there, it's over. It takes the picture, no one's involved, it's all automatic and you're capturing this fantastic information about what's happening to the planet and it's only going to get better. I mean, it's great at the moment, but it's going to be brilliant in the future.
[00:50:50] Dallas Campbell: That's a good place to pause, I think. Great now, even better in the future. Fantastic. Okay, well, I feel I'm going to leave this podcast feeling slightly more optimistic. Thank you very much.
[00:51:00] Luisa Doughty: Thank you.
[00:51:00] Paul Green: Thank you.
[00:51:01] Issabelle Crozier-Morris: Thank you.
[00:51:02] Dallas Campbell: To hear future episodes of In-Orbit, don't forget to subscribe on your favorite podcast app, whatever that might be and to find out more about how space is empowering industries in between episodes, don't forget you can visit the Catapult website or just join them on social media.