Canada pledges to reduce oil and gas methane emissions by 40% to 45% below 2012 levels by 2025 as part of their Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) under the Paris Agreement. The reality with methane emissions monitoring is that it is very costly, time consuming, labour-intensive, and error-prone for oil and gas companies to identify leaks, quantify emissions, dispatch repair trips, validate results, generate reports, and ensure regulatory compliance. As a result, fugitive leaks are not detected in a timely manner, repairs are not effectively prioritized, permit extensions are not applied on time, fugitive and vented emissions are not accurately quantified, and costs are unnecessarily incurred due to redundant inspection and repair trips.

 

One of the biggest challenges for GHG emission reduction is the ability to integrate, aggregate and fuse heterogeneous methane emissions data from disparate methane sensors into a coherent sensor web. This would allow oil and gas companies to automate data wrangling tasks and report generation, and train AI models to detect and predict fugitive emissions. 

 

An interoperable standard for methane data sharing is a critical first step to realizing these methane monitoring efficiencies. In partnership with the OGC, SensorUp is developing a new international best practice standard for methane sensors and observations, based on the ISO 19156:2001 Observations and Measurements (O&M) and OGC/ITU-T SensorThings API (ITU-T Y.4473) standards.