Turns out this exists! The company I worked at last summer, GHGSAT [1], focuses exactly on this.
They have a fleet of satellites and aircraft taking high-resolution (1-25m ground resolution) pictures of critical infrastructure on demand that allow oil and gas companies and landfills, notably, to identify those leaks and either patch them to recover the methane or torch the methane, greatly reducing the impact of the leak.
The figures mentioned in the original article are very much what we observed as well. It wasn't all that uncommon to see leaks releasing 12 tons of methane per hour be left unpatched for *weeks*.
Thanks to pressure from investors and to the additional revenue gained from identifying and patching those leaks, a lot of governments and the biggest oil companies have started paying for this service.
Seems like the obvious first step would be requiring companies to buy emission certificates to cover those leaks. It'd very quickly become profitable to fix them.
I agree that we should have larger financial incentives/pressure on these companies, but I don't know how good of a solution it is to tax at the emitter like this considering how hard it is to track those leaks still.
The size of the images taken from GHGSAT's satellites could never cover a whole region reliably and they still require a lot of processing to allow for the detection of smaller leaks. I think that would create a situation where companies would underreport those leaks and the government wouldn't have a reliable way to check if they did.
I think it'd be much more efficient to tax consumers in general for the oil they purchase and "let the free market do its thing". The transition or rather, letting the polluters pay their fair share, needs to happen much quicker than what we're seeing today and half-assed measures aren't getting us there anytime soon.
They have a fleet of satellites and aircraft taking high-resolution (1-25m ground resolution) pictures of critical infrastructure on demand that allow oil and gas companies and landfills, notably, to identify those leaks and either patch them to recover the methane or torch the methane, greatly reducing the impact of the leak.
The figures mentioned in the original article are very much what we observed as well. It wasn't all that uncommon to see leaks releasing 12 tons of methane per hour be left unpatched for *weeks*.
Thanks to pressure from investors and to the additional revenue gained from identifying and patching those leaks, a lot of governments and the biggest oil companies have started paying for this service.
[1]: https://www.ghgsat.com/en/