New Solutions for Leak Detection to Improve Safety and Environment Control
Preventing gas leaks and emissions that threaten safety and the environment is a big challenge for the oil and gas industry. The technology development company GasOptics Sweden AB offers new and effective solutions. The so-called Gas Vision System (GVS) developed by GasOptics shows, in realtime, a coloured image of the plume from a gas leak, overlaid on a regular video image of the facility that is monitored. The flow and concentration of the gas leaks are shown. Several stationary gas cameras can be linked in a system that provides continuous monitoring of a production or processing plant. With displays and alarms in the control room, operators will immediately be able to see and locate any gas leak, determine the size and initiate repairs. With a system of this kind, safety and environment control at production and processing plants will be improved and product losses reduced. The costs for traditional leak detection and remedy can be reduced. GasOptics technology identifies specific gases very quickly and accurately. The plans are to launch the first commercial product, a GVS for methane, in September 2004. The development occurs in collaboration with the Statoil-operated, large gas processing plant at Kårstø in Norway. Development of a model that will meet the requirements for continuous monitoring of gas leaks on offshore production platforms has also begun. In this application, which is focused mainly on safety, automatic shut-off functions can be added. Other gases and applications will be added to the product range. Examples of this are monitoring of liquid natural gas (LNG) ships and terminals and airborne pipeline inspection.
A Development Company with Strong Backing
GasOptics Sweden AB was founded in 2000 by three researchers at Lund Institute of Technology. The company’s proprietary technology is a result of research carried out at the Institute’s Atomic Physics Division, which is one of the leading Scandinavian research institutions in infrared and laser technology. In 2003, the Norwegian national oil company Statoil, through its venture capital subsidiary, Statoil Innovation AS, invested in GasOptics and became the largest shareholder. Statoil Innovation’s investment was driven by interest in the gas visualisation technology for petroleum industry applications and by the international market potential. GasOptics is located at Ideon Science Park in the university city of Lund in southern Sweden. Ideon, adjacent to the institute of technology, offers a dynamic environment for many high-tech development companies.
Advanced Technology
The unique and patent-pending technology of GasOptics relies on 30 years of research experience, first at the Chalmers University and later at the Lund Institute of Technology, in the group of researchers behind the company. The GasOptics technology combines all the winning concepts – remote sensing, passive monitoring, imaging and selectivity and sensitivity combined in the gas correlation principle. The unconventional spectroscopic technique where an ultimately high spectral resolution can be combined with a very good signal economy is called ‘gas correlation imaging’. The technique is inherently adapted for imaging and disregards conventional spectrometer designs. Instead, it relies on the capability of a gas in a system cell to recognise its own spectral features in the incoming radiation, using a unique analogue parallel processing mode, where the full spectrum is monitored simultaneously and in all image points. The gas correlation technique relies on the fact that nobody knows the spectrum of a particular gas better than the gas itself. A high selectivity and a high sensitivity are obtained.
By combining a thorough spectroscopic knowledge with advanced optical design, the most modern detector and data processing technologies, GasOptics offers realtime visualisation of gas leaks with an extremely user-friendly and intuitive image interpretation, also allowing quantification of the amounts released. Thus, the petroleum and the petrochemical industry are provided with a new and very cost-effective instrumentation.
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Integrated Operations
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