LongPath advances DOE-funded methane mitigation

LongPath Technologies said January 26 it is deploying new laser network technology in the Permian basin of Texas and New Mexico, enabling real-time monitoring, sizing and mitigation of methane emissions from oil and gas production.

The company is commercially scaling its Basin-SCAN (Basin Scale Continuous oil and gas Abatement Network) after it was awarded $5mn from the US Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) last year. Basin-SCAN is engineered to reduce emissions by 60-80% within the system coverage area.

"LongPath provides the industry gold standard of methane emissions monitoring, providing total site coverage, including flares, and reducing the time to find and fix leaks from months to real-time," LongPath co-founder Caroline Alden said. "We're the only peer-reviewed published continuous monitoring system, and the sustained long-term emissions reductions for our customers speak to that quality." 

"A number of oil and gas operators have embraced our cost-effective technology as key to meeting their ESG objectives, and the DOE has identified Basin-SCAN as a step-change advancement in the nation's emission reduction toolbox," she added.

The Basin-SCAN program will result in the largest continuous emissions monitoring network for the oil and gas industry. 

The company has 10 centralised laser nodes operating in the Permian, monitoring well sites, tank batteries, and compressor stations by interacting with non-intrusive mirrors installed in production infrastructure. Another three networks are in operation in other US production basins.