Google and CSU team up to look for methane leaks.
You've most likely seen a Google Street View car mapping the street in front of your favorite cafe. Their cameras protrude from the roof of the vehicle like some sort of 'Big Brother' program, but a vinyl wrap of a Google maps and lettering on the door reminds us that it's not the police. However, this time, instead of mapping out cities and street corners, those camera cars are roaming cities around the country looking for something else – methane gas.
Researchers at Colorado State University are teaming up with Google to "see" methane gas leaks that are invisible to the naked eye and are otherwise hard to detect. The idea is that the new technology will help to find and repair many of these small leaks, but in a more efficient and cost effective manner. This is all in an effort to reduce emission of the gas – a greenhouse gas that has 80 times the warming power of carbon dioxide over a 20 year span.
The program is spearheaded by associate professor of Biology Joe von Fischer, and it's supported by a variety of groups including the non-profit Environmental Defense Fund and Google Earth Outreach. Others contributing to the project include researchers from the statistics department, atmospheric sciences department, computer sciences, and soil and crop sciences. Even the University of Northern Colorado is contributing, as well as the nonprofit science collective Conservation Science Partners.
“This is a huge challenge that almost nobody had been thinking about. Now we’re finding out just how widespread these leaks are,” von Fischer said. “The faster you fix them, the bigger the environmental benefits are. But utilities and regulators didn’t have the data to focus their efforts. That’s where we come in. Our goal is to make it faster, cheaper and easier to find and measure methane leaks from natural gas lines to help accelerate crucial repairs.”A version of moblie infrared lasers, technology that didn't exist ten years ago, are at the base of the technology. The mobile units are said to be able to detect plumes of methane gas in real time eliminating the need for a gas chromatography analysis in the lab. “The air contains gases that make it look foggy in the infrared spectrum,” von Fischer explained. “The laser can scan through colors of infrared light and ‘see’ how much methane is present.” Presently, there are four Google Street View cars looking for leaks on predetermined routes in various cities. About two thousand data points are captured per minute, and the efforts report that cities like Boston and others with older corrosion-prone distribution systems are seeing 25 times more leaks.
