Executive Q&A: Impact of Continuous Emissions Monitoring on Shale

For the oil and gas sector, the path to lowering emissions can often be complex and challenging. 

To overcome the drawbacks of manual inspections, continuous monitoring for leak detection has emerged as a popular tool for oil and gas operators to meet their sustainability commitments and achieve ESG goals.

Continuous methane monitoring offers numerous benefits to oil and gas producers including the ability to deliver real-time emissions data that can be used to detect, locate, quantify and stop fugitive emissions events quickly, minimizing loss of valuable product and substantially mitigating the unintended release of methane to the atmosphere.

Hart Energy recently caught up Bear Givhan, CEO and co-founder of Colorado-based Earthview, to talk about the company’s continuous monitoring platform and why this technology has emerged as the most accurate, scalable and affordable monitoring solution in the market today.

“We are currently seeing increased interest in Earthview’s BluBird emissions monitoring system. We sense that the interest isn’t driven by increased drilling activity; rather, we believe that operators are realizing that, at our price point, the system pays for itself by keeping more methane in the sales line and less in the atmosphere.”—Bear Givhan, CEO and co-founder, Earthview

Founded in 2019, Earthview has developed a vast network of field-ready air quality sensors that are being deployed by operators across Colorado, Permian Basin, Barnett Shale and Appalachian Basin. The idea for the company, according to Givhan, came from frustrations with existing methods for surveying oil and gas infrastructure for natural gas leaks and the imitations associated with these methods.

Hart Energy: Tell us more about Earthview’s BluBird continuous methane monitoring platform and what makes it different from similar technologies in the market?

Givhan: The BluBird system is a continuous emissions monitoring platform. What makes it unique are both the hardware and software components. Our hardware is simple, accurate, and robust. it’s ready to work 24/7 in the oil field. The next part of the Earthview equation is our software.

This is really what differentiates Earthview from its competitors. The BluBird software uses sophisticated algorithms to accurately identify, locate, and quantify emissions on any location.

Together, these components make BluBird an inexpensive but highly accurate monitoring solution. Recently, an independent third-party testing demonstrated that our system achieved 90% probability of detection (POD) at emission rates as low as 10 kg/hr. The data we received from this testing proved that we are well within the range required by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and various certification agencies.

Hart Energy: How are you helping operators achieve their ESG goals?

Givhan: We’re mostly engineers and scientists here at Earthview, so we like to quantify our impact for operators. As one example, we recently caught a 4 Mcf per hour emission on an operator’s location.

On a 3-month inspection cycle, that might have emitted 8,640 Mcf before being corrected. At $9/Mcf, that’s nearly $78,000 in lost revenue! And according to the EPA’s greenhouse-gas equivalency calculator, correcting that emission is the same as not driving a car a million miles, or planting nearly 8,000 saplings and letting them grow for 10 years.

That’s real impact, from one emission on one location. We’re looking forward to helping many operators achieve their ESG and financial goals.

Hart Energy: As drilling ramps up, are you seeing increased interest from oil and gas operators to deploy new emissions monitoring technologies?

Givhan: We are currently seeing increased interest in Earthview’s BluBird emissions monitoring system. We sense that the interest isn’t driven by increased drilling activity; rather, we believe that operators are realizing that, at our price point, the system pays for itself by keeping more methane in the sales line and less in the atmosphere.