Elevating Detection

Methane monitoring, previously an exercise in estimating leaks and extrapolating emissions from incomplete data, is about to become a hard science, rather than an art.

The Loan Programs Office (LPO), a department of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), is providing a $162.4 million loan guarantee to LongPath Technologies, Inc. A monitoring network, the Active Emissions Overwatch System, will use tower-based lasers for remote continuous emissions detection, location, and quantification. LongPath’s network is expected to monitor up to 24,000 square miles over tens of thousands of oil and gas sites.

Part of funding through the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the LPO loan guarantee will allow construction and installation of over 1,000 remote monitoring towers, providing a real-time methane emissions monitoring network. This network is projected to include tower sites in every major U.S. oil and gas production region, including California, Colorado, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wyoming.

Identify and Notify

The goal is to rapidly identify methane leaks and notify operators to allow repair and response and to prevent extended releases. An estimate of the annual preventable methane releases is around the equivalent of 6 million metric tons of CO2, about the emissions of 1.3 million gas vehicles.

Large oil and gas production areas and extensive equipment for production, compression, and transmission mean methane leaks are difficult to identify and measure. Current emissions monitoring relies on aircraft-based air sampling and optical gas imaging (OGI) cameras, which cannot always capture intermittent leaks, the most frequent type of methane releases.

The new network will utilize sight-safe lasers to identify airborne molecules of methane, with each tower-mounted laser capable of continuously monitoring an area of ~8 square miles, with full coverage and updates as often as every two hours. Leaks as small as 0.06 kg/hour can be accurately identified.

The LongPath laser and molecule identification technologies were developed with the University of Colorado and the National Institutes of Standards and Technology, supported by DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E) and additional DOE grant funding.

Continuous monitoring will allow reliable, timely detection of emission sources. The laser-based network will be capable of identifying, localizing, and quantifying low levels of methane emissions, allowing operators to address leaks rapidly. It is estimated that greenhouse gas emissions could be reduced by 90%, compared to existing OGI monitoring.

More Mitigation

As more data becomes available to operators on the location and intensity of emissions, identifying the most impactful mitigation efforts to prioritize is paramount. BioSqueeze provides a proven solution 4x more successful at sealing methane leaks at the wellhead than cement and other alternatives, delivering an efficient fix to maximize emissions reduction while minimizing costs and time on site.