Finding efficient and accurate ways to map and monitor methane sources is becoming a priority within government and industry, both for environmental applications and hydrocarbon exploration. For more than 10 years, Sander Geophysics and Shell have cooperated to develop airborne methods to detect and measure the enhanced methane concentrations associated with ground-level sources. The resulting data can be processed using a Markov chain Monte Carlo method (MCMC) to determine the locations and emission rates of the methane sources responsible. SGMethane is the name of Sander Geophysics' methane survey method, resulting from the collaboration with Shell. It consists of an optical gas sensor, an anemometer, a GPS, and an inertial navigation system, analogous to Shell's LightTouch method. A test survey was flown over two active waste landfill sites close to Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, and the modeled data corroborated the locations of the dumpsites. Several commercial surveys for environmental monitoring and hydrocarbon exploration have been flown in a wide variety of different countries and climates; these show that both systems can detect localized anomalous methane sources even in the presence of dense vegetation, such as a tropical rainforest.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.