Like SEES, OptiSite is designed to deal with a highly fragmented production landscape with multiple equipment types and manufacturers and allow users to visualize their data in real time from equipment and assets across an entire network (Figure 1).
Guide to Methane Detection and Quantification Technologies
In April, four industry groups, including the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative (OGCI), London, published an 82-page guide to help oil and gas operators select and deploy methane detection and quantification technologies.
It updates the original guide, which was published in 2023, to include advances in methane detection technologies and relevant data sheets and decision trees that operators would use to deploy these technologies. This includes six new technologies and updates to 14 others.
Interestingly, one of the main challenges identified by the report is a lack of independent standards for comparing technologies.
“Different technologies sense methane differently, quantify methane in different ways, attribute emissions to specific sources using different formats, and report methane emissions detection and quantification differently,” it noted.
The report recommends that the industry develop consistent practices that allow robust and comparable testing of different methane emissions detection and quantification technologies. This could include, for example, a unified definition of detection threshold and probability of detection using comparable metrics.
It’s a view bolstered by a June 10 article published in Environmental Science & Technology by researchers from McGill University, Quebec, Canada.
They found that methane emissions from Canada’s dormant oil and gas wells are seven times higher than previously thought.
The Department of Civil Engineering team directly measured methane emissions from 494 wells across five provinces. The national emissions estimate they arrived at — 230,000 t/yr — is sevenfold higher than the 34,000 t/yr reported in Canada’s National Inventory Report.
“One surprising finding was just how much the drivers of emissions varied between provinces. We thought geological differences within provinces would matter more, but the dominant factors appear to be at the provincial scale, likely due to variations in policy and operational practices,” said Mary Kang, associate professor of civil engineering at McGill and senior author on the paper.
The researchers emphasize that improving methane data is critical to meeting Canada’s climate targets.
“If we don’t have accurate estimates of methane emissions, we can’t design effective climate policies,” Kang concluded.
