The world’s oil and gas companies have been working for years to find better ways to find and repair leaks of methane, which is both a potent greenhouse gas and a challenge to detect.
They’ve deployed airplanes. They’ve used satellites. They’ve launched balloons.
But LongPath Technologies has a different idea closer to ground. The company uses an array of devices and mirrors to create a laser-beam fence around drill pads and other facilities.
The system recently received conditional approval for use in New Mexico, marking a potential step forward in more effectively monitoring the potent greenhouse gas.
The company also recently finalized a $162 million loan from the U.S. Department of Energy to speed up deployment of its nationwide emissions monitoring network.
“This loan speeds up our capacity to offer operators the technology needed to achieve significant methane reductions, supporting both operational efficiency and environmental sustainability,” LongPath CEO Ian Dickinson said in a news release.
Caroline Alden, co-founder and chief scientist at LongPath, said the system offers precise measurements and coverage by observing changes in light from a laser beam when it passes through methane.
“Methane absorbs at certain colors of light,” Alden said. “When you send that laser beam that we’ve created that’s very specifically tuned to methane’s vibrational and rotational properties, and then we bounce the light back off that mirror, we can see essentially where the methane fingerprint has been imposed on that light.”
The system supports leak detection and repair (LDAR), Alden said. LongPath is a data-as-a-service provider, Alden said, working with companies including ConocoPhillips and Williams Cos.
“We’ll go put our array of lasers and we only work directly with the oil and gas companies, so we never provide data to regulators or outside parties,” Alden said. “They get that constant data feed, they get email alerts, they can download the data for their reporting.”
The benefits go beyond speedier LDAR. They also save companies from conducting regular in-person inspections.
“It’s a huge gain, especially in areas like New Mexico,” Alden said. “You can have extensive drive times. These folks have to go out once a week under the [current] rule. Now they only have to go out there if there is definitely a confirmed repair that needs to be made.”
Approval from the New Mexico Environmental Department allows companies to use LongPath’s technology to meet obligations under Ozone Precursor Rule 50, which aims to reduce emissions from oil and gas operations. The process took a year of intensive review from state regulators, Alden said.
“They don’t want anything but the best to replace their programs,” she said. “The public wants to see that if something’s being allowed for environmental compliance, that it’s really good.”
Alden said Colorado has also approved LongPath’s technology for use there. But Texas, home to most of the Permian Basin, doesn’t have a similar pathway for approving alternative methane-detection technologies, she said.
With or without state approval, “this is a low-cost way to drive efficiencies in your operations,” Alden said. “Our job is to find the methane. We’ve cracked that nut. We can do that real easily.”