Remote sensing technologies can be applied for a wide range of gas-leak flow rates in three main cases—major leaks in crisis management, medium-size leaks in safety monitoring, and small leaks in environmental monitoring.
A gas test campaign, conducted by Total; ONERA, The French Aerospace Lab; and Advanced Concepts in Imaging Software (ADCIS) in September 2015 using three hyperspectral infrared cameras from Telops, confirmed the capacity to visualize in 3D and quantify in real time plumes of methane in the range of 1 to 50 g/s. The research and development project on gas remote quantification continued with a second gas-test campaign in 2017.
The second gas-test campaign was organized on Total’s Lacq Pilot Platform in France and involved several gas spectral imaging systems:
- Mobile hyperspectral cameras in the long-ravelength infrared (LWIR) band (7.7–12 µm)
- A multispectral camera in the LWIR band (7–9µm)
- A multigas light detection and ranging (LIDAR) system coupled with a wind LIDAR system
Five other international teams (from the US, Spain, Norway, and France) were also invited to assess the capacity of their remote-sensing systems to quantify methane and carbon dioxide releases.
The 2-week test demonstrated that methane leak emissions ranging from 0.7 to 140 g/s could be visualized and quantified in real time using a mobile Telops Hyper-Cam. This campaign also served to validate the performance of several remote sensing technologies.
Total’s Lacq Pilot Platform is a test area for qualifying cost-effective systems designed to complement the gas-detection system of a plant and provide valuable information should a gas leak incident occur. New methodologies for the early detection of anomalies using remote observation systems including drones, robots, and artificial intelligence data-processing systems are being investigated there.
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