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Measurement of Oil and Natural Gas Well Pad Enclosed Combustor Emissions Using Optical Remote Sensing Technologies
Citation:
Modrak, M., E. Thoma, A. Eisele, R. Matichuk, AND G. Tonnesen. Measurement of Oil and Natural Gas Well Pad Enclosed Combustor Emissions Using Optical Remote Sensing Technologies. In Proceedings, Annual Conference of the Air & Waste Management Association, Raleigh, NC, June 23 - 26, 2015. US Environmental Protection Agency, Cincinnati, OH, 12 pg, (2015).
Impact/Purpose:
This is a confernece paper for 108th Annual Conference of the Air & Waste Management Association, June 23-26, 2015, in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. This is a prelinary report on the recent R8 RARE project on well pad ECD emissions.
Description:
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Office of Research and Development (ORD) and EPA Region 8 are collaborating under the EPA’s Regional Applied Research Effort (RARE) program to evaluate ground-based remote sensing technologies that could be used to characterize emissions from enclosed combustion devices (ECD) at upstream oil and natural gas well pads. This paper describes a 5-day pilot study executed by ARCADIS in September 2014 to remotely observe emissions from ECDs at multiple well pads in Weld County Colorado using a passive Fourier transform infrared radiometer, and a mid-wave infrared hyper-spectral imager. The goals of the study were to evaluate the measurement technologies, provide speciated emissions information, and to assess the combustion efficiency (CE) of the ECDs. A total of 10 well pads were surveyed during the campaign. This paper describes the measurement systems, field deployment methods, and select results from the study. In general, the remote sensing approaches were found to be potentially useful as a research tool for offsite observation of ECD operation if more direct onsite measures are not available. Limitations were found in ease of execution, data analysis throughput, and observable ECD temperature ranges. Of the 10 sites observed, two sites had ECDs that could not be measured due to insufficient infrared signal caused by overall low combustion throughput (resulting in low temperature of the ECD). With uncertainties in CE accuracy noted, seven of the 8 measurable sites showed ECD CEs generally exceeding 95%. One site showed higher emissions of several alkanes and alkenes, with CE values calculated to be as low as 0.60.