LongPath Technologies, Inc. is advancing its groundbreaking Basin-SCAN continuous methane monitoring and abatement technology across the Texas and New Mexico Permian Basin oil and gas fields.
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A year after winning a $5-million US Department of Energy (DOE) award, roughly 180 sq. mi. of the Permian Basin are being monitored 24/7, as the company makes headway toward Basin-SCAN objectives of 700 sq. mi. of continuous coverage. As of January 2022, 10 centralized laser nodes were operating within the Permian, each monitoring dozens of well sites, tank batteries, and compressor stations by interacting with non-intrusive retroreflective mirrors installed within production infrastructure. An additional three networks are in operation in other US production basins.
The Basin Scale Continuous Abatement Network (Basin-SCAN) enables real-time monitoring, sizing and mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions from oil and gas production. Basin-SCAN technology is engineered to reduce emissions by 60-80% within the system coverage area.
“LongPath provides the industry gold standard of methane emissions monitoring, providing total site coverage, including flares, and reducing the time to find and fix leaks from months to real-time. We’re the only peer-reviewed published continuous monitoring system, and the sustained long-term emissions reductions for our customers speak to that quality,” says LongPath Technologies Co-Founder and Vice President of Product and Markets Caroline Alden, PhD. “A number of oil and gas operators have embraced our cost-effective technology as key to meeting their ESG objectives, and the DOE has identified Basin-SCAN as a step-change advancement in the nation’s emission reduction toolbox.”
LongPath Technologies received the DOE award on Feb. 12, 2021, under the agency’s highly competitive Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy’s (ARPA-E) Seeding Critical Advances for Leading Energy technologies with Untapped Potential (SCALEUP) program. The then-newly instituted ARPA-E SCALEUP program recognized the emerging Basin-SCAN technology as ostensibly generating the largest continuous emissions monitoring network within the domestic oil and gas industry.
Founded in 2017, LongPath Technologies leverages Nobel Prize-winning technology developed at the University of Colorado and NIST to engineer actionable laser systems that probe unique “fingerprints” of methane, carbon dioxide, hydrogen sulfide and other molecules across > 50,000 wavelengths (colors) of light. After a decade of research and development, the company’s foundational Frequency Comb Laser technology combines low system cost and field robustness with continuous long-distance emissions detection. LongPath is based in Boulder, CO.