Abstract
We compare continuous monitoring systems (CMS) from three different vendors on six operating oil and gas sites in the Appalachian Basin using several months of data. We highlight similarities and differences between the three CMS solutions when deployed in the field and compare their output to concurrent top-down aerial mea surements and to site-level bottom-up inventories. Furthermore, we compare vendor https://doi.org/10.26434/chemrxiv-2024-0vsw6 ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8752-5536 Content not peer-reviewed by ChemRxiv. License: CC BY 4.0 provided emission rate estimates to estimates from an open-source quantification algo rithm applied to the raw CMS concentration data. This experimental setup allows us to disentangle the effect of the sensor platform (i.e., sensor type and arrangement) from the quantification algorithm. We find that: 1) localization and quantification estimates rarely agree between the three CMS solutions on short time scales (i.e., 30-minutes), but temporally aggregated emission rate distributions are similar between solutions, 2) differences in emission rate distributions are generally driven by the quantification algorithm, rather than the sensor platform, 3) agreement between CMS and aerial rate estimates varies by CMS solution but is close to parity when CMS estimates are av eraged across solutions, and 4) similar sites with similar bottom-up inventories do not necessarily have similar emission characteristics. These results have important impli cations for developing measurement-informed inventories and for incorporating CMS inferential output into emission mitigation efforts. Keywords: methane, oil and gas, intercomparison, continuous monitoring systems, emission mitigation, detection, localization, quantification Synopsis: We compare three different continuous monitoring systems (CMS) on operating oil and gas sites over several months, with implications for CMS deployment in practice.
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