Commercialisation of the greenhouse gas monitoring system SkyLine2D

In order to meet the global targets for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, measurements of the effects of land use and land management practices on GHG emissions are increasingly needed, with a strong and growing requirement for new technologies to enable these measurements. Resulting from previous NERC funding, researchers and engineers at the University of York (UoY) have developed a novel technology, SkyLine2D, which overcomes many of the problems inherent in the current technologies used to monitor terrestrial GHG fluxes. Using the unique approach of suspending a single mobile chamber above the ground, SkyLine2D overcomes many of the limitations of existing, small ground-based auto-chamber systems, which are extremely expensive, inflexible in use, have a heavy site impact and are unable to measure over many vegetation types. The aims for this Follow-on Fund project are to make key technical developments, whilst obtaining relevant IP protection and product certification, that will turn SkyLine2D into a viable commercial product. Finance from the Follow-on Fund grant would be used to further develop SkyLine2D in order to be able to carry, or work with, all major brands of GHG analyser, as well as to provide an independent on-board carbon dioxide monitor. We also need to make improvements to the existing prototypes in terms of data logging and supporting software. Although we already have quite a number of customers interested in buying SkyLine2D we are unable, at present, to sell the system because of these final technical developments whiuch we need to make. Equally important is the requirement for appropriate electrical and mechanical certification before we are allowed to sell the equipment to customers around the world. The vision is for the establishment of a small University spin-out SkyLine company based in York, employing several engineers and scientists, with associated sales and administrative staff, selling SkyLine2D GHG monitoring platforms for use throughout the world. The immediate obvious benefit is to provide local employment, but also to facilitate the collection of important GHG emission data to assist in developing policies for land use management which limit GHG emissions; the equipment could be a vital tool in our search for management strategies for reducing the global atmospheric GHG burden.

If successful, the commercial development of SkyLine2D will result in three main impacts: firstly, through creation of a small or micro-enterprise, it will create employment in the UK producing high value goods for both the UK market and for export; secondly it will enable previously impossible environmental data to be gathered in support of environmental policy in both developed and developing countries and, thirdly, it will place the UK as the international leader in innovating and supplying field equipment for greenhouse gas measurements. It is intended that the SkyLine2D company will not simply focus on SkyLine2D as a single product but will continue to innovate further systems; for example, we already have a far more advanced, but much more expensive, prototype SkyLine3D research platform built, targetted at the agricultural research major infrastructure market.

By meeting the objectives of this NERC-funded Follow On project, we would then be in the commercial and technical position to proceed with SkyLine2D production and sales in 2017/2018. If we are able to immediately start commercial manufacturing SkyLine2D at the end of the Follow On funding, we already have existing enquiries for supply of SkyLine2D systems, amongst which are enquiries for provision of multiple systems, we could produce sufficient early profits to support the formation of a spin-out company. In the short term, the SkyLine2D company will provide limited part-time employment for local engineers; in the long-term the spin-out company would seek to train and employ several engineers, together with product support and sales staff, based in York.

Included in our proposed technical developments is overcoming our current reliance on a single brand of CO2 analyser (Licor, USA) to enable the use of a wide range of on-board greenhouse gas (GHG) analysers, vastly increasing the range of potential users. In addition to making this clear and customer-focussed improvement to accommodate equipment for users who already own alternative GHG analysers, the inclusion of an integrated and relatively inexpensive CO2 analyser would also greatly increase the market for SkyLine2D; since no additional analyser would be needed for basic CO2 flux measurements this would make the SkyLine2D system particularly attractive to scientists working in developing countries.

In addition to 'kick-starting' a new UK technology-based University spin-out company, all sales would also lead to sales for the other UK-based companies supplying embedded key system components. This includes two of the UK's leading manufacturers and exporters of environmental science instruments; Delta-T Devices Ltd and ADC BioScientific Ltd.

At the broader level, the high-quality data produced by SkyLine2D will be of critical importance in determining the environmental sustainability of a wide range of land use and agricultural practices, delivering critical data on net carbon balance. Without direct measurements of the impact of changes in agricultural management practices in a range of locations and over suitable time-scales, policy makers still lack the evidence base necessary for informing the development of successful auditing policies for reducing GHG emissions from natural and managed landscapes. This includes, for example, the recent major reforms of the European Union Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), specifically designed to reduce the major GHG emissions from European agriculture, but currently supported by a woefully inadequate evidence base. We believe that reasonably-priced, widely-available and reliable SkyLine2D systems will not only be a key leading technology for measuring these GHG emissions in developed and developing agricultural systems, but also has great potential as a novel platform for a wide-range of ecological measurements.