Page 28: of Offshore Engineer Magazine (May/Jun 2023)

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FEATURE DECARBONIZATION

Photos on spread: Wintershall Dea

A bit further out, several hundred meters from a fare, the with various measuring tools - Optical Gas Imaging with an

Seekops technology is still sensitive enough for accurate infrared camera can cover 2,000-5,000 sources a day, while measurement of unburnt methane. sniffng can cover 700-800 sources a day. An ultrasonic in-

Business is heating up. ternal valve leak device was used to check vent and safety

The US and EU are looking to make emitters pay, but valves, and a bagging technique provided accurate quanti- customer and corporate goals are becoming important too, fcation. Drones and airplanes were used to measure emis- even in places where the regulations are not as developed. sion sources that were diffcult to access. In Germany alone, “It’s early days in many places for measuring and report- Wintershall Dea found around 249,000 potential leak ing emissions. A lot of operators are still fguring out their sources. These were either immediately repaired or tagged strategy,” says Dave Turner, Business Development Direc- and repaired shortly after, and the company’s methane in- tor – Asia Pacifc for SeekOps. “Here in Southeast Asia, tensity in 2022 was 0.08%, already below its target of 0.1%. where there’s hundreds of platforms, you can inspect a lot In 2022, Woodside commenced development of source of them very quickly using a drone.” level, bottom-up methane inventories for its assets and then

As detection technology grows in sophistication, a top- used top-down methods to assess their accuracy and com- down approach is supplementing the more traditional pleteness. Drone-based facility measurements were con- bottom-up approach to LDAR. The aim, says Turner, is ducted at several of Woodside’s offshore assets in Australia to validate bottom-up measurements using a directly mea- and the Gulf of Mexico. The program included a trial of the sured independent method. Companies are looking to Providence Photonics’s video imaging spectro-radiometry quantify methane emissions at a macro level to reconcile technology for fare monitoring, Mantis Lite™. Abate- the numbers obtained by identifying specifc leaks with ment measures included retroftting dry seals on compres- drone-mounted or fxed sensors and hand-held tools. sors and minimizing use of high emitting compressors.

Environmental service providers, such as Texas-based A recent DNV study highlights that key strategies for

Encino Environmental Services, offer a range of services reducing methane emissions include minimizing vent- for detection, quantifcation, and mitigation, and hand- ing from processes, improving leakage management and held equipment is becoming more compact, facilitating applying optimized maintenance procedures. Across the rapid on-site assessments. The intrinsically safe optical gas industry, solutions have also included moving away from imaging camera Mileva 33 OGI, for example, weighs less pneumatic actuators that use process gas to electric com- than 1.5kg without batteries while still being able to detect ponents and the inclusion of fugitive gas recovery systems methane leaks of less than 0.35g/hr. that send the gas to the fare. Meanwhile OEMs are reduc-

Wintershall Dea used two specialist contractors (TP Eu- ing methane slip from their power and pump systems.

rope and The Sniffers) in its 2022 LDAR campaign along Leaky valves and improperly made ftting connections 28 OFFSHORE ENGINEER OEDIGITAL.COM