Articles | Volume 14, issue 1
https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-14-71-2021
https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-14-71-2021
Research article
 | 
05 Jan 2021
Research article |  | 05 Jan 2021

Facility level measurement of offshore oil and gas installations from a medium-sized airborne platform: method development for quantification and source identification of methane emissions

James L. France, Prudence Bateson, Pamela Dominutti, Grant Allen, Stephen Andrews, Stephane Bauguitte, Max Coleman, Tom Lachlan-Cope, Rebecca E. Fisher, Langwen Huang, Anna E. Jones, James Lee, David Lowry, Joseph Pitt, Ruth Purvis, John Pyle, Jacob Shaw, Nicola Warwick, Alexandra Weiss, Shona Wilde, Jonathan Witherstone, and Stuart Young

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Cited articles

Cardoso-Saldaña, F. J., Kimura, Y., Stanley, P., McGaughey, G., Herndon, S. C., Roscioli, J. R., Yacovitch, T. I., and Allen, D. T.: Use of Light Alkane Fingerprints in Attributing Emissions from Oil and Gas Production, Environ. Sci. Technol., 53, 5483–5492, 2019. 
Conley, S., Franco, G., Faloona, I., Blake, D. R., Peischl, J., and Ryerson, T. B.: Methane emissions from the 2015 Aliso Canyon blowout in Los Angeles, CA, Science, 351, 1317–1320, 2016. 
Conley, S., Faloona, I., Mehrotra, S., Suard, M., Lenschow, D. H., Sweeney, C., Herndon, S., Schwietzke, S., Pétron, G., Pifer, J., Kort, E. A., and Schnell, R.: Application of Gauss's theorem to quantify localized surface emissions from airborne measurements of wind and trace gases, Atmos. Meas. Tech., 10, 3345–3358, https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-10-3345-2017, 2017. 
Crawford, T. L., Dobosy, R. J., and Dumas, E. J.: Aircraft wind measurement considering lift-induced upwash, Bound.-Lay. Meteorol., 80, 79–94, 1996. 
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Short summary
Measuring emission rates of methane from installations is tricky, and it is even more so when those installations are located offshore. Here, we show the aircraft set-up and demonstrate an effective methodology for surveying emissions from UK and Dutch offshore oil and gas installations. We present example data collected from two campaigns to demonstrate the challenges and solutions encountered during these surveys.
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