Everything you need to cite, quote, link, or challenge our work — fact sheet, boilerplate, quotes, brand files, and a direct line to the team.
Ghost Permits fuses satellite atmospheric chemistry, 10-metre optical imagery, and public permit records to produce independent, timestamped evidence of unpermitted industrial emissions — for any facility on Earth.
Ghost Permits is an open-source intelligence tool that detects unpermitted industrial combustion from orbit. By fusing Sentinel-5P TROPOMI atmospheric readings, Sentinel-2 optical imagery analysed by Liquid AI's LFM2.5-VL-450M, and public permit databases, it produces reproducible evidence briefs that are timestamped by the atmospheric archive itself. The pilot case documents xAI's Colossus supercomputer build-out in South Memphis, Tennessee, where 35+ gas turbines operated without an air permit for at least 184 days.
Ghost Permits is an orbital accountability tool built for the gap between what industrial facilities file and what they actually emit. When xAI brought the "Colossus" supercomputer online in South Memphis in July 2024, it installed more than 35 methane gas turbines without filing for an air permit — in a community where cancer risk already sits at four times the national average. Neither regulators nor the public learned about the turbines until aerial photographers flew over months later.
The ESA Copernicus satellite archive, however, recorded the emissions from the first day of operation. Ghost Permits makes that record legible. The pipeline pulls Sentinel-5P TROPOMI daily NO₂, HCHO and SO₂ columns; downloads Sentinel-2 10-metre optical scenes from the free Element84 STAC; runs Liquid AI's LFM2.5-VL-450M vision-language model to count equipment and verify heat signatures; cross-references the jurisdiction's permit database; and scores the combined evidence on a 0–100 scale. Every number is reproducible from public data with a single CLI command.
Built with LiquidAI LFM2.5-VL and deployable on DPhi Space orbital infrastructure. Open-source, Apache-2.0.
The satellite doesn't care who filed a permit. It just records what's burning.— Premise
For 184 days the paperwork said nothing was happening. For 184 days the atmosphere said otherwise. We are publishing what the atmosphere wrote.— On the Memphis case
Environmental regulation runs on filings — documents submitted by the same companies being regulated. When those filings lag operations, the gap is pollution. The gap is cancer rates.— On the method
Every piece of evidence on this site is reproducible from free, public data. If we are wrong, we are wrong in public, with the notebook on the table.— On transparency
We will publish analyses before operators respond, because operational timelines matter to the people downwind.
We will correct any specific number that an operator or regulator shows is wrong — visibly, in place, with a changelog. Corrections never remove the original claim; they annotate it.
We will not publish the physical addresses or coordinates of natural persons. Corporate and industrial facility coordinates are fair game.
We will not take money from the entities we monitor. The project is funded by open grants and individual donations, disclosed in full on the methodology page.
We believe the Copernicus archive is public evidence. Reproducing our pipeline should be possible for a competent student in an afternoon. If it isn't, that's a bug — tell us.