Detect to Act in Seconds: How Real-Time Intelligence Is Rewriting the Rules of Emissions Management 

AI-first Methane Emissions Accelerator on Microsoft Fabric powered by Real time Intelligence and Fabric IQ 

Every industry has its version of the same problem. Something goes wrong in the field. By the time the right people find out, hours or days have passed. 

In energy, that “something” is a methane leak spotted by a satellite 200 miles above the Permian Basin. In manufacturing, it’s a quality defect caught on a production line. In logistics, a cold chain breach crossing state lines. Detection is getting faster everywhere. But turning detection into meaningful action? That’s where most organizations still stumble. 

Over the past year, iLink Digital and Microsoft have co-developed Project Green Sky, an AI-first Methane Emissions Accelerator built on Microsoft Fabric Real-Time Intelligence.

The insight that shaped this work was simple but powerful:

The hardest part was never finding the leak.
The hardest part was making the data meaningful fast enough to matter.

Why Methane, Why Now?

According to the IPCC AR6 report, Methane traps roughly 80 times more heat than CO₂ over a 20 years horizon — yet breaks down in the atmosphere about 12. That makes methane mitigation one of the fastest levers available for climate impact reduction.

Cut methane today, and you see results fast. For oil and gas operators, it’s also a business story: methane *is* natural gas, so every leak is revenue escaping into the atmosphere. 

Policy pressure is accelerating:

• The U.S. EPA’s updated methane regulations are now in effect.
• The Inflation Reduction Act introduced a Waste Emissions Charge framework.
• The EU is implementing methane intensity requirements for imported gas.
• Certification programs like MiQ are influencing pricing premiums for low-emission production.

Meanwhile, satellite detection capabilities have evolved dramatically. Carbon Mapper’s Tanager-1 can detect facility-level plumes. RMI analysis shows that super-emitter events can account for roughly 20% of observed emissions, many of which are not captured by traditional ground monitoring.

The detection layer is maturing rapidly.

The data is there. The urgency is real. What’s missing is the layer that turns detections into action. 

The Real Problem Is Context, Not Detection

When a satellite spots a methane plume at a set of coordinates, it answers exactly one question:

Something is emitting here.

It does not answer:

• Which specific facility is responsible?
• Which piece of equipment is failing?
• Is there a correlated SCADA anomaly?
• Is there a regulatory reporting deadline approaching?
• What is the financial exposure per day?

Today, satellite data lives in one system. SCADA in another. Maintenance records, LDAR histories, permit databases — scattered everywhere with no common model. Field teams spend hours manually piecing data together before anyone can dispatch a crew. The leak keeps leaking the entire time. 

 If you’re not in energy, swap in your own version. In food safety, a contamination signal needs supply chain and distribution data before a recall can happen. In aviation, vibration data means nothing without flight hours and maintenance logs. The pattern is universal: value lives in the connections between data sources, not in any one source alone. 

Project Green Sky Framework: Four Stages from Signal to Action 

 We built Green Sky around a framework I think applies far beyond methane. 

• Detect – Satellite identifies an emission — coordinates, rate, wind data. The external signal. 

• Attribute – Geospatial joins match the detection to a specific facility, operator, and permit. External data meets enterprise data. 

• Contextualize – We layer in equipment records, SCADA time-series, maintenance history. That plume? It’s a pressure relief valve on Tank 3, replaced two weeks ago. Pressure is spiking. An LDAR inspection last month flagged this at 50 kg/hr — it’s now at 850 and climbing. 

• Act – Business logic fires. Financial impact: $10,000+/day in lost product. EPA notification required within 24 hours. Nearest team dispatched with right parts. Work order generated — in seconds. 

From a dot on a map to a contextualized work order with dollar amounts and deadlines. That’s the gap between data and intelligence. 

Built on Microsoft Fabric 

This kind of platform needs to unify batch satellite feeds, streaming SCADA data, structured ERP records, and geospatial computation in one place. Fabric does this without forcing operators off their current platforms — Mirroring replicates from Databricks, Snowflake, or SAP with zero ETL. 

Real-Time Intelligence is the Engine:

Eventhouse for time-series analytics, KQL for temporal correlation between emissions and SCADA anomalies, Activator for triggering automated response workflows the moment a super-emitter is detected. 

Fabric IQ now in public preview, takes it further. Its ontology layer defines what “facilities,” “equipment,” and “emission events” mean in business terms — and becomes the foundation for agents that can answer questions like “How are we doing on methane at our facilities?” and take autonomous action.

In our demo, an agent analyzes the emissions landscape, identifies the highest-risk facility, and generates a Jira ticket with full context — severity, dollar impact, equipment history, crew assignment — all within seconds of detection. 

What the Data Told Us 

When we ran Carbon Mapper data through our Eventhouse, one finding hit hard. Across our synthetic Contoso scenario, 16 emission events were detected across 8 facilities. Of those, 84 percent never triggered a work order. Several were super-emitters above 2,000 kg/hr. 

This was demonstration data, not a study of real operator performance. But the pattern it illustrates is well-documented: detections happen, data exists, and without the intelligence layer, signals sit idle while emissions continue. At current gas prices, each unresponded super-emitter can mean $5,000 to $15,000 per day in lost product. 

Find Us at FabCon 

Project Green Sky is a co-innovation between iLink Digital and Microsoft. We demonstrated end-to-end capability at our January 2026 webinar with Microsoft’s Energy team, and now we’re building toward a distributable Fabric Workload for the Workload Hub. FabCon and CERAWeek in March are the next milestones. 

If you’re heading to Atlanta, come say hello. We’ll be showing a live demo — satellite detection to automated work order — and I’d enjoy the conversation, whether you’re in energy or facing the same detect-to-act challenge in another industry. For qualified customers, Microsoft funding may be available to get started at no cost. 

Drop me a line at subbu@ilink-systems.com — I read every one. 

The satellites are watching. The sensors are streaming. The question isn’t whether you’ll have visibility. It’s whether you’ll act in time.