The Canadian emissions monitoring company GHG Sat launched a satellite to monitor from space for the first time the carbon dioxide emissions from individual facilities, such as coal plants and steel factories.

The company said that the satellite, called “Vanguard,” was launched from the Vandenberg Space Forces in California. GHGSat data is available for sale to industry emitters who want to reduce their emissions, as well as to governments and scientists as the space-age technology is increasingly being used to hold polluting industries accountable for their contributions to climate change.

Vanguard will rely on the growing network of satellites that already monitor plumes of methane, an invisible greenhouse gas that is difficult to detect because it tends to escape from a range of small sources, including pipelines, drilling sites, and farms. Carbon dioxide accounts for approximately 80 percent of US greenhouse gas emissions resulting from human activities and tends to enter the atmosphere from large industrial sources such as power plants.

The Canadian company said that the satellites that monitor carbon dioxide in the atmosphere do not currently focus on emissions at the level of individual facilities. The company's CEO, Stefan Germain, said that the data collected by Vanguard will help prove the practices that contribute to carbon dioxide emissions and measure these emissions.