Single Photon Lidar Imaging of Carbon Emissions (SPLICE)

As natural gas becomes the leading fossil fuel, industrial gas leaks are becoming a major source of climate changing carbon emissions. The SPLICE project assembles a world-leading scientific and industrial consortium to develop and industrialise gas (methane) imagers based on time-correlated single photon counting, one of the early applications of quantum technology. This revolutionary UK technology will make accurate leak measurements at a fraction of existing costs, allowing the global gas industry to control fugitive gas emissions, help save many billions of £, and building a sustainable world leading business that reduces climate change.

Shortwave infrared (SWIR) wavelength single photon avalanche detectors (SPADs) are emerging from initial applications to quantum telecommunication networks into new sensing applications, including vehicle lidar. QLM, a start-up out of the University of Bristol and QuantIC, the Quantum Enhanced Imaging Hub, and ID Quantique, the world leader in near IR single photon detection, have used non-cryogenic SWIR SPADs to demonstrate innovative, low-cost, highly sensitive, long range, single-photon lidar gas imagers that see and measure invisible toxic gases. These quantum gas imager prototypes have demonstrated outstanding performance, but the technology remains at prototype level, using individually packaged commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) photonic and optical components and only addressing a single gas, methane, so is not yet ready for industrial use. The SPLICE project will be a major expansion of engineering talent and effort aiming to build the first scalable industrial product to come from the UK's £billion investment in quantum technology. The SPLICE team will innovate this technology into a flexible sensor platform that addresses key customer demands for robust, low cost and industrially qualified products that can simultaneously image multiple greenhouse gases. Commercial photonics experts QLM, IDQ, Compound Semiconductor Application Catapult and Bay Photonics will collaborate to expand the range of critical components, develop new multiple gas designs, start UK development of enabling SPAD detectors with the University of Sheffield, and expand work on new mid-IR quantum sensing architectures that can measure all possible gases with the University of Bristol. Together we will integrate the best of these new designs into compact state-of-the-art packages and develop and qualify complete networked IoT imager products to industry requirements. And then with gas emissions experts at the National Physical Laboratory and natural gas and industrial sensor leaders National Grid, Ametek, and BP we will validate our imagers' capabilities for commercial applications and start to address the multi £100m business opportunity.