Finding natural gas leaks more quickly and at lower cost could reduce methane emissions.
Finding natural gas leaks more quickly and at lower cost could reduce methane emissions. Ten promising technologies mounted on drones, trucks and airplanes were tested last year. The results are in.
On trucks, drones and airplanes, 10 promising technologies for finding natural gas leaks swiftly and cheaply competed in the Mobile Monitoring Challenge, the first independent assessment of moving gas leak detectors at well sites. The organizers of the contest – Stanford University’s Natural Gas Initiative and the Environmental Defense Fund – describe the outcomes in a study published Sept. 10 in Elementa by University of California Press.
While billed as a “challenge,” the organizers had no intention of declaring a winner, as the technologies focused on different aspects of leak detection, such as exact location or size of the leak. While the technologies are still in development, overall, they all found gas leaks quite well.
The study examined finding leaks at production equipment that can be found in a gas field, not on finding below-ground leaks that might occur from pipes in cities.
Read more at: Stanford University
A drone sniffs for methane leaks in the Mobile Monitoring Challenge at the test site in Colorado. (Photo credit: Sean Boggs/Environmental Defense Fund)
