Through a project with Colorado State University, Google Earth Outreach in partnership with the Environmental Defense Fund has helped some major U.S. cities and natural gas utilities find underground methane leaks.
The researchers equipped Google Street View cars with special methane sensors that mapped the locations of leaks, and also assessed the severity of the leaks.
In Boston, Google Streetview took air readings from March to June 2013. The team was able to create a map of leaks emanating from old natural gas lines, some that date back more than 50 years. The project also included testing the equipment in Chicago and Los Angeles, according to Seeker.
According to the snapshot on EDF’s website, Boston had nearly one methane leak for every mile mapped.
Utilities routinely monitor city pipe systems for methane leaks, but its a labor-intensive and time-consuming practice. The new method presents cities with a way to dramatically ramp up such monitoring and advising decision makers where to spend infrastructure repair dollars.
For New Jersey’s Public Service Electric & Gas, the partners were able to better target a three-year, $905 million pipe replacement project. In 2016, the researchers mapped hundreds of miles of urban pipeline over six months and produced a map showing the utility where it could reduce overall methane emissions by 83 percent and replace 35 percent fewer miles of pipeline that what it had planned with its assessments. The utility is currently in the process of replacing 510 miles of old pipes.
How Methane Sniffing Cars Work
The system sucks in city air from an opening in a Google Streetview car’s front bumper, and pumps it into intake equipment in the car’s trunk where it is pulsed with infrared light. If methane is present, it will absorb the infrared light. Light that escapes the tube is measured by computers that use algorithms monitoring the data flow - 2,000 data points per minute. The computers pinpoint the leak locations using GPS.
To avoid street-level emissions from natural gas-powered buses, each route is driven multiple times. Only elevated methane readings that measure two or more times in the same location are included in the mapping.
See it in action:
The team of researchers recently published the study, Rapid, Vehicle-Based Identification of Location and Magnitude of Urban Natural Gas Pipeline Leaks, in Environmental Science & Technology.
