ENV-00-182 Development of Smart LDAR for Fugitive Emissions Control

Description:

A cost effective fugitive emission reduction program should focus on the location and repair of the very high leakers in place of monitoring all of the piping components, 99 percent of which do not leak appreciably and, therefore, do not contribute significantly to the mass emissions. The new Gas Imaging technology allows greater efficiencies in monitoring large numbers of process piping components. Therefore, locating very high leakers can be done more frequently at reasonable costs and more frequent repair of these very high leakers can result in lower overall emissions. The Gas Imaging system was recently tested on several process units at a refinery and was able to easily identify components that were very high leakers. During this testing, screening rates as high as 200 components per minute were successfully demonstrated.