Ravikumar to Co-Lead Cheniere Emissions Monitoring Initiative
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May 25, 2022
Hildebrand Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering Research Associate Professor Arvind Ravikumar will co-lead an emissions monitoring initiative to investigate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions at multiple natural gas facilities across Cheniere Energy’s supply chain, the company announced in April. Ravikumar will collaborate with Colorado State University’s Daniel Zimmerle on the first-of-its-kind project, which will take place over several months and provide comprehensive real-time emissions data.
Ravikumar and Zimmerle will deploy a combination of ground-based, aerial and drone-based emissions monitoring technologies to quantify, monitor, report and verify GHG emissions at natural gas gathering, processing, transmission and storage systems across Cheniere’s supply chain. The pair will independently analyze and confirm the emissions data while also assessing the performance of the technologies.
“It is vital for both public policy and science that we have empirically driven measurement protocols and, importantly, that the complex and voluminous data collected is independently analyzed and verified by the scientific community,” says Ravikumar, who runs UT PGE’s Sustainable Energy Transition Lab.
The emissions monitoring protocol Ravikumar and Zimmerle implement for Cheniere can likely be scaled across industry to “create individualized, high spatial and temporal resolution emissions information, enabling new applications such as supply-chain-specific emissions intensity estimates. In other words, we will be able to differentiate the emissions footprint of natural gas that comes to your house versus my house,” Ravikumar says. Such a system would appeal not only to consumers looking to make environmentally conscious decisions about how their energy is produced and transported, but also to companies looking to independently confirm their emission reduction commitments. “Everyone wants this — it’s a win-win for science and industry.”
Ravikumar joined UT PGE last fall. Through his Sustainable Energy Transition Lab, he focuses on developing technical, social and policy solutions to effective climate action in the global energy sector through a combination of field work, model development and policy design. Most recently, he was named to the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Gas Pipeline Advisory Committee, which evaluates proposed pipeline safety and environmental protection standards and makes policy recommendations.
As the leading producer and exporter of liquefied natural gas (LNG) in the United States, Cheniere is a full-service LNG provider, with capabilities that include gas procurement and transportation, liquefaction, vessel chartering, and LNG delivery. Cheniere has one of the largest liquefaction platforms in the world, consisting of the Sabine Pass and Corpus Christi liquefaction facilities on the U.S. Gulf Coast, with expected total production capacity of approximately 45 million tons per annum of LNG in operation.
