Climate gas methane from industrial plants: "Leaks persist for months"

Methane is a much stronger greenhouse gas than CO₂. Nevertheless, the industry often treats leaks in its plants as a trifle. The EU Parliament has now decided to set new limits for methane emissions from oil and gas imports. However, the new rules will only take effect from 2030.

Ravi Srinivasan is Global Vice President and General Manager for Emissions Management at Honeywell Connected Enterprise. In an interview with heise online, he talks about the problem gas methane - and how the industry is still struggling to plug leaks.

heise online: Mr. Srinivasan, how do companies report their emissions these days, for example in the USA?

Ravi Srinivasan: Normally the system is based on emission factors. You take the consumption of natural gas or oil and multiply it by a factor. This is normally done with a top-down view. Technically, you meet all the requirements of the environmental authorities.

But the reality is that you can only reduce emissions if you measure them at the base, i.e. at the source of the emissions - because that's the only way to find out where the problem lies. So everything may appear to be fine on the surface, but in reality it's not.

And when we talk to our customers, they quickly agree that there is a problem. They just don't know where exactly they should change something. Of course, you can always make some big changes to your factory and things like that. But to increase the operational efficiency of a plant, you first need a better information base.

How does methane leak detection currently work?

In the US, the current mechanism, if you go to the plant level, is very old. It is called LDR: Leak, Detection, Repair. The technicians and their staff go around the plant and measure the emissions with so-called sniffers.

They normally do this once a quarter, sometimes only once every six months. They measure the emissions, come back to the office and report them. Then they go to the plant later and rectify the problem within the next 30 days. At least that's what the regulations say.

That doesn't sound very precise.

Right. What happens if you carry out the measurement today and it is discovered that something is leaking? Then an extrapolation is made. "The last time I measured was three months ago." So it is assumed that the emissions were so and so high in the last three months. And then a calculation is made. A lot of estimates are made.

Honeywell wants to make these measurements more accurate. How?

We want to use new sensors to finally enable our customers to measure in real time. Plant operators will be able to define a limit value and find and rectify a leak immediately. What would previously have taken three to four months, we can now potentially do in a matter of hours.

The sensors are the size of a can of Coke. They have magnetic contact surfaces and can therefore be attached almost anywhere. They work in the form of a mesh network. The reason for this is that you can't find the methane leak with a single sensor on site if the wind is coming from the other direction. So if you have a whole array of sensors, you can actually triangulate a leak. These sensors are simply powered by batteries. We are also investigating the possibility of direct energy generation so that they no longer need any electricity at all.

In addition to the sensors, we also use special cameras. They can take pictures of gas clouds and work hyperspectrally. Each gas has its own signature. The system can recognize and measure this signature. If new gases - and therefore leak sources - are added, we can simply create a new signature for them. It's basically like a surveillance camera, but for gases.

It seems strange from the outside that there are still so many methane leaks in the industry. As you know, methane is simply natural gas - a very expensive resource, as we learned after the start of the Ukraine war in Europe. Why is industry so slow to react?

The more methane that is captured - or does not disappear from plants – the more it can be used for a better purpose. The bottom line for the organization is better returns. So good leak detection should be in the interest of companies. The other aspect is combustion efficiency in general. We burn a lot of natural gas. How do we make sure that we use the best combustion algorithm to ensure that the plant runs without losses?

How sustainably our customers can operate a plant will be the key to success for them in the future. I always compare this to the safety culture that has now reached a generally high level in the industry. At some point, the issue simply became established. The way I see it today, it is part of our DNA, part of our daily work.

In the same way, sustainability will eventually become an integral part of our daily work. It will simply become standard. Then we will no longer have to ask ourselves whether we are emitting too many emissions or have leaks. They will simply no longer exist. And you'll save a lot of money at the same time.

Methane leaks, as they appear today, seem like an incredible waste to the layman.

If there is a leak, you can usually see it in the processes. So the combustion is not as good as it could be. The problem is that it's often not bad enough for a company to repair the leak. Normally there are certain threshold values in a plant. If it's a localized problem, people will come and fix it pretty quickly.

But what if you're dealing with a plant that's a long way away? If you only discover a small leak or other sporadic problems there, some customers wonder how costly the repair is. "Do I really have to go there now?" Unfortunately, these are questions that arise again and again.

What threshold values are we talking about? Is it 20% that is lost, or perhaps even a loss of half?

This can vary from process to process and depends on the various parameters, such as the pressure in the system. We are currently working on developing a better predictive analysis to determine the specific conditions under which these problems occur. The aim is to determine exact values for a specific plant so that we know exactly what will happen if the process or plant conditions indicate this.

Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas. Why do we only seem to be really looking at it now? Was natural gas simply too cheap, so companies didn't care if there were major leaks?

That could be one of the reasons. Another reason was the lack of regulations without fines. And that is still a problem.

So where does the pressure on the industry come from?

People are becoming more and more aware of what's going on, and more and more sustainability obligations are being imposed on companies, whether by investors, banks, the environmental organizations or other interest groups.

So there is definitely a lot of pressure from different directions. Companies themselves are also increasingly responding to the demand for more sustainability.

So does the industry recognize the problem?

I think that management will basically agree that we have a problem. And people are quite prepared to solve the problem. Regulations such as fines and a kind of carrot and stick approach might well get people to do something about it.

And I think it's time we did that. If not for us, then for the future generation, so that they can live safely on our planet. The good thing is that most of the companies we talk to have also set themselves targets. They want to reduce methane emissions to zero by a certain date.

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