An Alberta firm is one step closer to building a device that can be flown over pipelines and cities to detect natural gas leaks, air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.

Synodon Inc. of Edmonton has raised about $300,000 from first-round private investors for its project, which will cost an estimated $3.6 million.

The company’s goal is to put advanced gas-detection technology – originally developed for Canada’s space program – on helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft.

“There is no technology of this sort anywhere in the world that is looking at these particular applications,” says Adrian Banica, president and CEO of Synodon.

Image courtesy Canadian Space Agency
The Canadian Space Agency uses a NASA satellite to detect gases in Earth’s atmosphere.

There are more than one million kilometres of gas-transmission pipelines and more than 2.25 million kilometres of gas-distribution pipelines (mainly in cities) in the world. Alberta’s oil and gas industry alone operates more than 300,000 kms of pipelines.

Synodon estimates the potential market for a reliable, airborne, gas-leak detector in the pipeline industry – excluding the urban gas networks – to be about $150 million a year, Banica says.

Brad Watson, in charge of pipeline integrity at a major Canadian petroleum company, says: “I think the market is quite large if the technology proves to be effective.” As pipelines age or become corroded or have other operational problems, they sometimes leak natural gas to the air. Leaks can range from pinhole-sized to extremely rare accidents where an entire section of a buried line explodes out of the ground.

“One of the primary intents of this technology is to find leaks along the pipeline, identify where they’re at and address them,” Watson says.

For the last 40 years, the most common way of checking for leaks has been for field staff to walk the length of the entire pipeline right-of-way. Workers carry a hand-held instrument called a flame ionization detector that samples the air and measures the gas concentration.

Banica says although flame ionization technology is relatively cheap, “the bulk of the cost for doing a survey is in low productivity and labour,” especially for a company with hundreds of kilometres of pipelines.

There are leak-detection technologies on the market that can be mounted on helicopters or fixed-winged aircraft and flown over pipelines.

One system uses an infrared camera that scans the air above the pipeline right-of-way for “cold spots.” These pockets of air – at a lower temperature than surrounding air – can occur when high-pressure gas escapes and rapidly cools as it expands.

But Banica notes that infrared detection is not capable of measuring the size of possible leaks. So workers on the ground must still check any cold spots detected from the air. Also, gas leaking from underground pipelines is warmed as it diffuses up to the surface, making it hard to spot with infrared.

Another airborne leak-detection method uses a laser-based spectroscopic instrument. It measures the chemical “fingerprint” of methane (natural gas) and its concentration, but only at the altitude at which the aircraft is flying.

“By the time you account for winds and dispersion, for the gas to reach 1,000 feet you will have a major leak on the ground,” Banica says. Synodon’s technology will combine the efficiency of airborne monitoring with a highly sensitive device that detects gas leaking, in extremely tiny amounts, at ground level.

Called gas-filter correlation radiometry, the technology was originally developed by the University of Toronto for the Canadian Space Agency. The agency wanted a reliable and precise way to measure the greenhouse gases carbon monoxide and methane in Earth’s lower atmosphere from a satellite.

The resulting instrument, called MOPITT (measurements of pollution in the troposphere), is still measuring the gases from an orbiting NASA satellite.

Synodon has acquired the right to use the technology for its airborne application, Banica says.

Simply put, gas-filter correlation radiometry works like a large camera that detects the chemical signature of specific gases and measures the total volume of gas present. It can also produce images of the leak.

“The important thing is that it actually uses the gas that you want to measure as a filter,” Banica says.

“That allows the instrument to have a very good sensitivity to that gas that you’re measuring.”

Synodon plans to mount the commercial version of its instrument technology, called “realSens,” underneath a helicopter.

As the chopper flies along at, say, 350 metres altitude, the instrument will capture a picture of the pipeline right-of-way that is 64 metres wide and 350 metres “deep” or high.

Banica says unlike current airborne methods, realSens will be able to measure the total volume of gas escaping from the pipeline – in a vertical column right from ground level to as high as the helicopter is flying.

For the first time, pipeline operators will have an airborne instrument that will allow them, using known wind direction and speed, to calculate precisely how much gas is escaping from a buried line in the ground.

“We’ll be able to offer some pretty significant information about these leaks to our future customers,” Banica says.

Synodon plans to have a small-scale model of its realSens instrument ready for laboratory testing by the end of March, with test results available in April.

The next step will be to build a full-scale prototype instrument for testing both in the laboratory and in the field.

Contingent on obtaining more private investment and government funding, this prototype should be ready by fall, Banica says.

The third and final phase will be to build the commercial version of the instrument.

The company wants to have it ready for deployment by the summer of 2004.

Web watch:
www.synodon.com
www.space.gc.ca