Finding and fixing natural gas leaks quickly, economically
areas in a car that looks fairly ordinary, except for the strange antenna protruding from its roof. Unknown to onlookers, Jackson and Ackley stare at data on a screen, waiting for the telltale ping to alert them of a gas leak nearby. They use a laser-based methane analyzer and the car’s strange antenna, which measures wind speed and direction, to survey leaks.
This type of survey in Cincinnati found that pipeline replacement programs had cut gas leaks by up to 90 percent. While working at Duke University in 2011, Jackson and colleagues discovered 3,000 leaks in Boston in collaboration with Boston University researchers. That mapping eventually led to policy reform in Massachusetts, Jackson said. He later performed a similar study in Washington, D.C., and found twice as many leaks as there were in Boston. He and his team are now working on home and building leak detection methods to document emissions from the curbside.
“Any leak is potentially explosive,” he said. “We’re trying to help engineer the system to be safer and more efficient.”
Our planet’s safety
While residential leaks pose risks to human safety, leakage in every piece of the natural gas industrial chain – wellheads, compressors, valves, pumps, gauges and pipe connectors – has serious implications for the climate.
Oil and gas companies want to help reduce the quantity of lost gas due to the associated costs and liabilities. Global fugitive methane costs over $30 billion in lost revenue per year, according to a 2012 study. And just 5 percent of leaks in the production and transport system are responsible for more than half the methane emissions, Brandt found in 2016.
“The gas industry cannot credibly claim to be a responsible player in global sustainability if it continues to emit significant quantities of methane through its operations,” Brandt said.
Working with postdoctoral scholar Arvind Ravikumar, now at the Harrisburg University of Science & Technology,Brandt recently led the Mobile Monitoring Challenge – a contest to find the most affordable and accurate ways of detecting natural gas leaks – along with colleagues from Stanford, Colorado State University and the Environmental Defense Fund.
In the course of the contest last year, drones whizzed overhead, trucks rumbled by and helicopters zoomed through the sky at controlled testing facilities in Fort Collins, Colorado, and Sacramento, California.
Results of the competition are expected to be published soon, and when they are, researchers at Stanford and beyond will have a new tool to help find and stop dangerous natural gas leaks at the wells and pipelines and close to homes.
