A Boulder company developing quantum laser technology developed at the University of Colorado Boulder to detect and quantify methane emitted by oil and gas facilities received a $162.3 million loan from the U.S. Department of Energy to expand its network.
LongPath Technologies, Inc. of Boulder, maker of the Active Emissions Overwatch System laser methane detector, will use the loan funding from the Federal Financing Bank to expand deployment of 1,000 detector systems in key U.S. oil and gas production basins to detect and quantify industry methane emissions over some 24,000 square miles in the nation’s most active oil and gas fields, according to a news release.
“The loan will support the scaling of LongPath methane detection and quantification technology to include 1,000 large-area remote methane monitors across Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, North Dakota, and New Mexico, serving as a game-changer for emissions detection, localization, and quantification,” said Rachael Shayne, spokesperson for LongPath.
Detecting methane leaks from oil and gas operations is a high priority for both Colorado and the Biden Administration. Stopping leaks, they say, is vital to achieving greenhouse gas reduction goals to protect the climate.
Brian Halchak, manager of environmental services at the Williams Cos. — a natural gas infrastructure developer based in Tulsa, Oklahoma —told The Denver Gazette in February that his company is investing in LongPath to better monitor their own emissions.
“One advantage of having more frequent monitoring is better data,” said Halchak. “And as we utilize and leverage more actual monitoring technologies, we can get a better understanding of the frequency of the emissions that we have and the magnitude of those emissions, which helps give us more information on how we most effectively reduce emissions at our facilities.”
The DOE and LongPath agree that continuous monitoring like this is a win-win scenario.
“The greenhouse gas emission profile of methane is far higher than that of carbon dioxide,” said Jigar Shah, director of the DOE Loan Program Office. “So, for every dollar of monitoring costs that the oil and gas industry are paying LongPath, there's another dollar associated with fixing the leaks that they find, and then that results in $5-to-$10 worth of additional product that they can sell. So, it's really a slam dunk economically as well as for the climate.”
Founded in 2014, LongPath became part of the federal Advanced Research Projects Agency Methane Observation Networks with Innovative Technology to Obtain Reductions (MONITOR) program to develop technologies to locate and measure methane emissions associated with natural gas production.
“The company was funded by Department of Energy grant funding to the tune of about $14 million from 2014 through 2021, and then funding of $30 million that we closed in the end of 2022,” said Ian Dickenson, president and CEO of LongPath in an interview. “The Department of Energy's loan program office is a continuation of the capital funding strategy to build out this network of methane sensors in the oil and gas industry, but also across broader applications — waste, mining, agriculture, and beyond. And so, this is a natural step for us in the evolution and the development of the company, both from a market coverage perspective, but also from a capital funding strategy.”
“We've deployed across every major oil and gas basin and are working across dozens of oil and gas operations with dozens of oil and gas operators,” Dickinson said.
Other potential uses include detection of other air pollutants including ozone and volatile organic compounds that create ozone, measuring flow rates of individual gasses in a mixture of gasses flowing through a pipe, measuring products of combustion in a hydrogen tractor engine, and measuring high-speed chemical reactions in hypersonic aircraft engines.
LongPath’s first phase of deployment will set up 1,000 solar-powered transmitter/receiver nodes that can cover up to 20,000 oil and gas sites. Each node can effectively monitor up to 20 sites within in a six-mile diameter circle, and the system will encompass more than 24 million acres.
LongPath’s technology, called a “frequency comb laser,” was adapted from technology used at the National Institutes of Standards and Technology in Boulder to precisely measure time and distance.
The LongPath laser outputs millions of discrete frequencies of light in short pulses 200 million times per second. Some of those frequencies can be absorbed by different kinds of gas molecules in the atmosphere. In LongPath’s device, when a specific frequency of laser light in the mid-infrared spectrum intersects with a methane molecule, the light triggers a quantum state change that allows the molecule to absorb the short pulse of light.
“A methane molecule is a carbon with four hydrogens and it's sort of rotating and vibrating,” LongPath co-founder Dr. Greg Reiker, a professor at the CU School of Mechanical Engineering, told The Denver Gazette. “And when we send out light that is at just the right wavelength to cause the rotational vibrational level to change, that's a quantum state transition — the light can be absorbed.”
By measuring the difference in the amount of the tuned light output and the amount received back from a retroreflecting mirror, the concentration of a specific gas can be calculated — in this case methane.
“Because every molecule is different — like methane has carbon and four hydrogens, water has an oxygen with two hydrogens — each molecule is different,” Reiker said. “So, it has different colors of light that it will absorb. That's the beauty of the frequency comb. You've got all these colors of light that are being absorbed in different patterns. You send all that light out, you get it back, and you can tell what’s in the air.”
This, he said, makes it possible for one detector to identify and quantify many different gasses at the same time — a device that can quickly and accurately detect and quantify methane and other toxic gasses like ozone and the volatile organic compounds that create it.
This could allow a community to set up a system downwind of a pollution source, that would continuously monitor air quality, detect pollutants, and notify downwind communities of possible risks.
Another potential is a system that would use the technology to scan an area to detect a pollution point source.
“One of the thoughts is to — and we've actually demonstrated this — put a reflector on a drone and then you can fly the drone around. That's one way to increase the spatial information,” Reiger said.
There’s little downside to this kind of oil and gas field methane monitoring, Reiker said.
“It’s one of these rare win-win-wins where, whenever we detect an emission for an oil and gas company, that can help save them product. So, there's an economic win there,” Reiger said. “And then there's obviously an environmental win in terms of keeping the gas in the pipe. And then there's a kind of societal win in terms of both creating jobs with this technology, and in terms of benefiting communities. So, every time we fix an emission leak, we might be saving some other bad emissions from getting out into the air that we don't want near our kids or near our communities.”
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