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Felipe Cardoso: Tiered leak detection and repair programs at oil and gas production facilities

Event Details:

Thursday, January 26, 2023
12:30pm - 1:30pm PST

Location

Online

Methane emission rates originating from oil and gas production facilities are highly skewed and span 6-8 orders of magnitude. Traditional leak detection and repair programs have relied on surveys with handheld detectors at intervals of 2 to 4 times a year to find and fix emissions, however this approach leads to leaks being active for the same interval independently of their magnitude. In addition, manual surveys are labor intensive. Novel methane detection technologies offer opportunities to further reduce emissions by quickly detecting the high-emitters, which account for a disproportionate fraction of total emissions. In this work, combinations of methane detection technologies were simulated in a tiered approach for facilities representative of the Permian Basin, a region with skewed emission rates and large numbers of high-emitters, which include sensors on satellites, aircraft, continuous monitors and Optical Gas Imaging (OGI) cameras, with variations on survey frequency, detection thresholds and repair times. Results show that in oil and gas production regions with skewed emission rates and large numbers of high-emitters, strategies that increase the frequency of surveys targeting high-emitters while decreasing the frequency of OGI inspections, which find the smaller emissions, achieve higher reductions than quarterly OGI and, in some cases, reduce emissions further than monthly OGI. 

 

Bio

Felipe Cardoso works as a methane emission researcher at ExxonMobil Technology and Engineering Company. In his role, he participates in research projects collaborating with universities, start-ups, industry, and NGOs.  He performs pilots of new methane detection technologies and works on LDAR modeling to assess the emission reductions of novel methane detection technologies. He was part of the team that submitted the first ever Alternative Means of Emission Limitation (AMEL) application on the oil and gas production sector to the US Environmental Protection Agency advancing the acceptance of airborne detection technologies for regulatory compliance. 

Before joining ExxonMobil, he completed a PhD at The University of Texas at Austin doing research on methane emissions and air pollution with a dissertation titled “Spatially, temporally and molecularly resolved models for methane emission estimation in oil and gas production basins”. He attended Tec de Monterrey, in Mexico, for his B.S. degree.

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