METEC has been extensively involved with the development, testing, and promotion of next generation leak detection and quantification (LDAQ) solutions. Development of these solutions has coincided with increasing interest in managing methane emissions. The old cliché is in full play: You can’t manage what you don’t measure, which rapidly became ‘you can’t manage what you don’t report’, be it regulatory or voluntary reporting. Non-industry stakeholders have driven this focus. These stakeholders are heavily interested in accurate GHG emissions and op-erate in a chronically data-limited position. Combined, these forces have focused almost solely on reporting, which, by extension, has positioned next generation LDAQ solutions as (potential-ly) faster, less expensive, more transparent, reporting tools.

In my opinion, a dominant focus on reporting discounts a core benefit of LDAQ solutions.

When positioned as ‘systems that make it easier to report’ the value to operators is inherently limited to what reporting operators must do for regulatory or commercial reasons. The cost-benefit tradeoff collapses to a ‘more/less’ cost analysis: What is the lowest cost way of report-ing accurately enough to satisfy stakeholders? From my 25 years of industrial experience, more versus less pain is a difficult value proposition in any business – particularly when other types of projects are competing for scarce capital resources.

So why are many operators invested in, and investing more in, these systems?

Operators’ opinions vary, but I’ve noted a common usage model emerging from some of the most experienced: A well-chosen LDAQ installation ‘looks everywhere’ on a facility and is likely to ‘spot something wrong.’ With quantification capabilities, even if rough, the solution also prioritizes problems – is this a big or small problem? In general, you want to monitor pro-cesses with SCADA, but there are always some failure modes that are expensive, cumbersome or just too rare to warrant in-process sensing. For these failure modes, ‘looking everywhere’ is a great, cost-effective, way to monitor facilities. If the solution matches the facility’s needs, LDAQ solutions can identify a problem early, before it becomes a publicity, safety, or econom-ic issue.

The fact that downwind LDAQ solutions are a reasonably unique way of doing this mitigates the fact that they are not always cheap to operate. Indeed, most solution developers are actively trying to reduce false alarms, shorten alert times, generally improve quality control on outputs. That said, many are already demonstrating this capability in field deployments.

OK, you sold me on monitoring … but why ‘methane’ monitoring?

Methane turns out to be uniquely enabling for LDAQ-style monitoring as it is a particularly at-tractive target for the required sensing. Methane is emitted from a wide range of process and equipment failures, even when the failure predominantly emits other gasses: Sense methane and you sense the problem, fix the problem and you mitigate a lot of other stuff. As a GHG, me-thane responds to IR light in instruments, making it possible to build sensors ranging from cheap to expensive, coarse to sensitive. It has a relatively low background concentration (1.9 ppm), making it possible to pick out enhancements of methane far easier than gasses like CO2 with higher atmospheric background. While reactive, it lingers for 7-12 years in the atmos-phere, supporting sensing at a wide range of scales; heavier hydrocarbons are far more reactive and unpredictable over larger scales. As a result – for O&G and waste management – methane is something of the ‘goldilocks’ gas – all the right attributes for component-to-facility-to-regional scale monitoring.

Unfortunately the focus on methane sensing creates a false tension between what the sensor senses versus what the solution accomplishes.

Since methane is a major greenhouse gas and has been a singular focus for reporting, any men-tion of CH4 engenders friction between those that prioritize versus deprioritize GHG reductions. This is a false tension. We need to separate the process and equipment monitoring advantages of LDAQ systems – which generally rely on sensing methane – from a single-minded focus on me-thane reporting. Both are valuable, but process monitoring delivers a core value that goes straight to the bottom line.

And, by the way, it also reduces the cost of reporting emissions for a variety of voluntary and regulatory programs.