Recent reporting misrepresented SkyTruth data.

We’re always glad to have conservation-minded groups and individuals use our flaring maps, but we would like to correct some errors in how our data was interpreted in two recent articles in the Stabroek News concerning natural gas flaring from an ExxonMobil-owned vessel, the Liza Destiny, anchored off the coast of Guyana.

In early June, 2020, the Guyana Marine Conservation Society (GMCS) contacted SkyTruth to see if we could help monitor natural-gas flaring from the Liza Destiny. The Liza Destiny had mechanical issues that required it to continuously flare, and GMCS wanted to be able to verify the flaring that ExxonMobil was reporting.

This isn’t a request that SkyTruth can normally help with, but the unique circumstances surrounding the Liza Destiny allowed us to provide GMCS with some meaningful data. Our global flaring map is a visualization of flaring events detected around the world, every day, using satellite data. The source of our data is the Earth Observation Group, which identifies flaring based on measurements of brightness and temperature captured by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration satellites. Due to the low level of detail of these images (each pixel represents a spot on the ground about 750 meters across), we usually can’t pinpoint flaring to a specific source such as an individual oil or gas well. However, since there were no other flaring vessels near the Liza Destiny, we could confidently assign all flaring events within the satellite’s accuracy to this vessel.

In mid-July, GMCS asked for an update containing the most recent data, which we provided by way of this document. The ensuing article in Stabroek News on July 25, 2020, erroneously claimed that our data showed the Liza Destiny was flaring from June 27 through July 7, a period when ExxonMobil reported to the Guyana EPA that there was no flaring because the vessel was undergoing maintenance.

Contrary to what the article suggests, the data SkyTruth provided did not contradict ExxonMobil. Our data did not show flaring on these dates, with the exception of June 28. It’s important to note that the lack of flaring in our data for that time period doesn’t conclusively prove there was no flaring, because clouds can block the satellites’ ability to “see” flares.

And none of this is to imply that there are not legitimate concerns about the persistent, long-term flaring at this vessel documented in the data we shared with GMCS.