LOLIPOP: LOcked Lasers for Integrated Path Optical Probing

The drive towards cleaner energy resources and energy security policies is promoting the development of a wider range of oil and gas reserves, such as fracking, in very remote locations. However, the loss of methane gas which is associated with these energy resources has a potent greenhouse impact on the environment that is far worse than carbon dioxide, which has been given much attention in recent years. To reduce the loss of methane into the environment from the equipment used in oil and gas extraction it is necessary to have an effective leak monitoring system to enable operators to spot leaks as they arise and take rapid action to fix them to minimise the release of methane into the atmosphere. Present methods of leak monitoring rely on a tedious, resource intensive manual process of sending an engineer to site with a hand held gas leak detector. This is particularly problematic when monitoring a very remote location, which is increasingly the case for newly developed oil and gas reserves.

The use of laser beams from an autonomous system to scan a wide area has proven be an effective method for detecting gas leaks in oil and gas facilities, as it has the required sensitivity to detect small leaks and locate them precisely. Compared to current methods of manual surveying such "open path" laser instruments provide continuous 24/7 monitoring which enables much faster and efficient response to repairing gas leaks than would otherwise be possible. If these are not detected they could continue unabated until the next survey, which may be as infrequent as an annual basis for some sites. It also allows the methane mass emission rates to be continuously monitored, which is necessary to support the implementation of legislation to regulate greenhouse emissions from such oil and gas sites. The same laser technology can be applied to other sources of greenhouse gas emissions such as landfill and agricultural sites.

Despite the great potential of this laser technology it is not yet suitable for long term unsupervised deployment in remote locations. The barriers to this for commercially available open path laser instruments are the high electrical power requirement, instrument size, and reliability of the laser beam alignment. MIRICO's LOLIPOP project is designed to address these limitations by developing the technology to enable a low power, easier to deploy instrument to be developed for commercial use in these applications