Using what they call “groundbreaking” methods, researchers in a new paper claimed to have found up to 12% of the globe’s methane emissions are coming from massive but often overlooked releases from major oil and gas producing regions.

The paper, published Thursday in the peer-reviewed journal Science, used thousands of daily images from a European Space Agency satellite to help researchers study what they dubbed “ultra-emitter” events from 2019 to the end of 2020.

With data from around 1,800 documented plumes, 1,200 of which came specifically from oil and gas infrastructure, scientists said new image analysis and machine-learning techniques accurately calculated an estimated 8 million metric tons/year (mmty) of methane escaping from the fossil-fuel-rich regions during...