Theme: 11. Advanced Diagnostic Tools

Topic Area: 11b. Remote Sensing, Drones, and Other Unmanned Systems for Remote Monitoring and Site Assessments

Formatted Title:

Source Determination of Volitile Fugitive Emissions in Near Real Time

Background/Objectives:

At a typical refinery, there are more than 2.5 million potential sources of leaks on the premisis, and determining the source of the contaminants is a problem. Traditional methods include LIDAR, thermal disorption tubes, handheld monitors, UV-Visible spectrophotometers, FTIR instruments, traditional air sampling and many others. New trends for operators include arial and satellite surveillance, infrared technologies and other expensive solutions. We will explore new inexpensive hardware and innovative cloud software technology that can determine fugitive emmision leaks in near real time.

Approach/Activities:

The approach is to explain how the use of field gas chromatographs or newer cloud-base remote monitoring sensors provide users real-time directional vectors (usually via an anemometer) and displayed geographically on a GIS based cloud portal assist this effort. Utilizing the vector lines from a minimum of three anemomters, the software can trianglulate the emission source and provide data to safety teams or response crews. The software can take into consideration environmental factors like wind speed and direction, humidity, temperature and others.

Admittedly, this is very new technology but early efficacy testing seems promising according to the industry.

Results/Lessons Learned:

After testing this method in actual refineries in the past four years, users have been able to identify close to 75% of the fugitive emissions sources that were indicated by the vector technology. This presentation will describe how these directional vectors are produced and fully utilized by the users.

This technology can be used cheaply and effectively to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions in our new zero carbon emissions environment.

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Ronald McMahan