In the ever-evolving landscape of emissions management for the oil and natural gas industry, collaborative efforts are proving to be a game-changer. One example is the Appalachian Methane Initiative (AMI), a group established by industry leaders Chesapeake Energy Corporation, EQT Corporation, and Equitrans Midstream Corporation. AMI perfectly demonstrates what unified basin-scale monitoring efforts can achieve, recently completing its 2023 pilot monitoring program.
As they put it, the AMI coalition is: “committed to further enhancing methane monitoring throughout the Appalachia Basin and facilitating additional methane emissions reductions in the region.”
Enhancing monitoring through an efficient collaborative approach means a broader and more comprehensive understanding of methane emissions—from oil and gas facilities, as well as from non-oil and gas sites. Improved operational efficiency is achieved by coordinating emission detection surveys across multiple operators.
The coalition has partnered with university research groups to conduct scientific analysis on the data, and findings from the work will be publicly available.
The AMI coalition of industry-leading energy producers enlisted Bridger Photonics’ Gas Mapping LiDAR™ (GML) technology as well as Champion X for methane detection.
To gain a better understanding of the sources and magnitude of emissions, the project scanned nearly two thousand natural gas facilities and dozens of non-gas facilities throughout the Appalachian Basin across 1,100 square miles in 2023.
Using aerial deployment, GML scans can cover hundreds of oil and gas facilities per day, all without the use of foot patrols. Collected data includes methane gas plume imagery, pinpointed emission locations, and quantification of emission rates, which allows the relative size of emissions to be compared.
Because of its innovative approach to data collection, AMI’s pilot program collected one of the most robust emissions profiles of its kind.
The findings of the 2023 pilot study revealed that non-oil and gas sources accounted for the majority of emissions measured in the region, varying between 53% and 76% depending on the quarter.
Coal mine operations generated the largest share of total emissions, with some individual emitters from coal sources exhibiting substantially higher emission rates than any detected oil and gas source.
For oil and gas sources, condensate tanks and compressors were some of the largest methane contributors, similar to previous research conducted by Carleton University on oil and gas facility methane sources.
The 2023 pilot project results emphasized the importance of combining aerial measurements with operational data in order to generate accurate emissions inventories (i.e. the total emissions footprint for a given operator or area).
The inaugural year of the AMI project has not only shed light on the magnitude and types of methane sources across the Appalachian Basin, but also showcased the power of collaborative innovation.
Thanks to the program's success in 2023, several additional major Appalachian oil and gas operators are set to participate in the initiative in 2024: MPLX LP, CNX Resources, Ascent Resources, and Seneca Resources. The 2024 expansion with these operators will provide deeper insights due to the increased amount of data collected across a larger geographic area.