Estimating natural gas emissions from underground pipelines using surface concentration measurements ☆ .

Autor: Cho Y; Department of Civil Engineering, University of Texas Arlington, Arlington, TX, USA. Electronic address: younki.cho@uta.edu., Ulrich BA; Natural Resources Research Institute, University of Minnesota Duluth, Duluth, MN, USA., Zimmerle DJ; Energy Institute and Department of Mechanical Engineering, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA., Smits KM; Department of Civil Engineering, University of Texas Arlington, Arlington, TX, USA; Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Colorado School of Mines, Golden, CO, USA.
Jazyk: angličtina
Zdroj: Environmental pollution (Barking, Essex : 1987) [Environ Pollut] 2020 Dec; Vol. 267, pp. 115514. Date of Electronic Publication: 2020 Sep 08.
DOI: 10.1016/j.envpol.2020.115514
Abstrakt: Rapid response to underground natural gas leaks could mitigate methane emissions and reduce risks to the environment, human health and safety. Identification of large, potentially hazardous leaks could have environmental and safety benefits, including improved prioritization of response efforts and enhanced understanding of relative climate impacts of emission point sources. However, quantitative estimation of underground leakage rates remains challenging, considering the complex nature of methane transport processes. We demonstrate a novel method for estimating underground leak rates based on controlled underground natural gas release experiments at the field scale. The proposed method is based on incorporation of easily measurable field parameters into a dimensionless concentration number, ε, which considers soil and fluid characteristics. A series of field experiments was conducted to evaluate the relationship between the underground leakage rate and surface methane concentration data over varying soil and pipeline conditions. Peak surface methane concentrations increased with leakage rate, while surface concentrations consistently decreased exponentially with distance from the source. Deviations between the estimated and actual leakage rates ranged from 9% to 33%. A numerical modeling study was carried out by the TOUGH3 simulator to further evaluate how leak rate and subsurface methane transport processes affect the resulting methane surface profile. These findings show that the proposed leak rate estimation method may be useful for prioritizing leak repair, and warrant broader field-scale method validation studies. A method was developed to estimate fugitive emission rates from underground natural gas pipeline leaks. The method could be applied across a range of soil and surface covering conditions.
Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
(Copyright © 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)
Databáze: MEDLINE
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