• ABB has received significant funding from the U.S. Department of Energy to design an Integrated Methane Monitoring Platform, a single repository that will aggregate, analyze, and visualize data from multiple sources in the United States for the first time
• With a total value of $1 million, the project will enable continuous methane emissions monitoring, mapping, localization and quantification across the entire natural gas supply chain and infrastructure in the country
• The comprehensive platform will help the United States significantly reduce methane emissions, pollution and waste, and reach city, state, and national sustainability targets

ABB has received significant funding from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management and the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) to design an Integrated Methane Monitoring Platform that will advance the development of new and innovative methane measurement, monitoring and mitigation technologies in the United States. The total value of the project is $1 million, of which DOE will contribute 80 percent, with ABB contributing the remaining 20 percent.

Today, methane emissions are recorded by academic researchers, industry and technology providers using many different methodologies and over various spatial scales and temporal intervals. The various methods yield data with vastly different performance characteristics and quality metrics.

At one end of the spectrum, sensors monitor methane emissions near natural gas producing regions quasi-continuously and report every 15 minutes with low accuracy, while at the other end of the spectrum, sensors mounted on aircraft and satellites patrol over large regions weekly or monthly looking for ‘super-emitters’.

Data is generally recorded, analyzed, and visualized separately. A single repository of data does not yet exist to handle data from multiple sources. With DOE’s funding, ABB will develop a detailed engineering plan for the first comprehensive, US-focused platform that will detect, quantify, and ultimately help to reduce methane emissions across the entire natural gas supply chain and infrastructure of the United States.  Keep reading.