oil and gas companies should be paying for building, launching and operating these birds and the data should be publicly available - this way they'll have at least somewhat proper incentive structure in place.
Nope, that would be a conflict of interest; they cannot be trusted to do all of these on time and adequately. They would need so much oversight that it'd be just as expensive to have an independent company run these things.
I mean pay for it by all means, but that's where they stop. And even that's dubious, because it's never as simple as them handing over money; there will be terms and conditions.
And of course, corruption would be widespread; the people working for this company monitoring methane emissions would get money or other benefits offered to them. And when you think about it, relatively speaking, people don't cost much.
I'm confident I'd be up for hiding some data or other dodgy shit if the money was right. Think getting a bigger house kind of money.
Oil and gas companies could easily do better right now (likely cheaper than the method in the OP). I know someone who worked at a fluid analysis modeling company and they claimed that pipelines could easily detect and fix leaks. Pipelines just don’t care until it passes a certain disturbingly high threshold where it affects profitability.
The evil and greedy people at the helm of these companies cannot be trusted with the responsibility of managing our planets resources without oversight.
