On Tuesday 13 September 2022, Satgana, a Luxembourg-based climate tech venture capital (VC) firm, announced an investment of €600,000 in a pre-seed round in the German methane intelligence startup Orbio Earth, to help curb industrial methane emissions.
Methane is a greenhouse gas, the second most abundant greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide and while greenhouse gases are important to absorb and later emit energy within the thermal infrared range and thus warm up the Earth’s surface and atmosphere, an increase in the atmospheric concentration of these gases also means that the average global temperatures are on the rise as well, which has a severe adverse effect on the global climate.
According to recent estimates, methane gas has over 80 times of global warming potential compared to carbon dioxide over a 20-year period, making methane gas emissions a resourceful target for climate change studies. Moreover, with methane emissions accounting for up to 30% of current global warming, more than 100 countries worldwide have committed to a significant reduction of methane emissions by 2030, establishing methane reductions as a “low-hanging fruit” in climate change mitigation. While emission reduction technologies are well established (especially for the oil and gas industry), one key bottleneck to methane reductions is the little amount of reliable emissions data that is available on the global scale of methane-emitting assets.
Germany-based startup Orbio Earth is building a solution to monitor global oil and gas methane emissions at an asset-level and thus trying to make methane emissions transparent and actionable on a global scale. Co-founders Robert Huppertz and Jack Angela said: “Although there is no silver bullet in the fight against climate change, we believe that the global deployment of groundbreaking technologies like satellite-based methane monitoring, can move the needle on climate action while solving real world customer problems and we are excited to have, with Satgana, a strong and committed partner on our side to do exactly that!”
By offering data that enables better decision-making, Orbio Earth aims to help the oil and gas industries (and other methane-emitting industries like waste and agriculture) to reduce their methane emissions by ten million metric tonnes by 2030.
Romain Diaz, Founder and General Partner at Satgana, commented: “Satgana aims to invest in the next generation of climate-positive startups. With the urgency of curbing greenhouse emissions in the short-term and the global momentum towards tackling the methane challenge, Orbio Earth represents a fantastic opportunity to accelerate the deployment of a high-potential technology solution for our planet to keep the goal of 1.5˚C of global warming within reach”.
More details are available online via: https://www.satgana.com/ and https://www.orbio.earth/.
