Miniature natural gas sensors weighing a few hundred grams with 10 ppb s-1 sensitivity towards methane and ppb s-1 sensitivity towards methane and ethane present the energy industry with cost effective ways to improve safety, comply with State and Federal regulations, decrease natural gas emissions, and attribute natural gas indications to thermogenic or biogenic sources. One particularly promising implementation is on small unmanned aerial systems (sUASs) flown by service providers or in-house personnel or even more ambitiously as part of larger network conducting autonomous, continual ...
Miniature natural gas sensors weighing a few hundred grams with 10 ppb s-1 sensitivity towards methane and ppb s-1 sensitivity towards methane and ethane present the energy industry with cost effective ways to improve safety, comply with State and Federal regulations, decrease natural gas emissions, and attribute natural gas indications to thermogenic or biogenic sources. One particularly promising implementation is on small unmanned aerial systems (sUASs) flown by service providers or in-house personnel or even more ambitiously as part of larger network conducting autonomous, continual monitoring.
This report describes refinement of the OPLS measurement system to include all ancillary instruments needed to put OPLS methane and ethane measurements into context for leak surveillance, localization, and quantification. Flights were conducted on a variety of VTOLs and fixed wing drones as described below to ensure that the overall system development resulted in a system that was platform agnostic.
This report describes:
The complete agnostic OPLS measurement system.The individual components are described and their performance investigated.Technical issues that arose during testing and field deployment are described.
Field experiments of the refined OPLS measurement system at a real-world oil and gas production site.These experiments exercise the OPLS system’s ability to do leak surveillance, localization, and quantification.
Laboratory development of the OPLS instrument to improve its performance in terms of signal-to-noise and accuracy.
Field experiments demonstrating the successful application of OPLS on a fixed-wing hybrid flown at altitudes higher than 50 m.
Field experiments demonstrating the utility of source attribution using the ethane measurement capability.