Rapid and Reliable Gas Leak Monitoring at Natural Gas and Biogas Plants

The question of whether natural or biogas plants are safe or not largely depends on whether they are leak proof. Methane is not only a greenhouse gas which is 22 times stronger than CO2,; it is also flammable, hazardous mixture when in contact with the ambient air. Therefore, leaks in gas plants must be located and dealt with quickly and precisely in order to ensure the plant’s safe operation. Until now, it has been troublesome and time-consuming, not to mention cost-intensive, to detect gas leaks by using conventional flame ionisation or semiconductor gas detectors.

The GasCam SG model, from Esders (Germany), offers you rapid and efficient methane emissions inspection at natural gas and biogas plants. This instrument is significantly more compact, light, and user-friendly than other systems on the market. The GasCam SG, a mobile infrared detector measuring unit, offers a far quicker solution than conventional detection techniques by diagnosing gas leaks at plants in real time and providing the user with moving images of the escaping methane cloud; leaks, and the associated point of escape, are therefore discovered immediately. GasCam SG can be up to 100 metres away from the object being measured. Trials have now proven that very small gas releases can be discovered reliably by GasCam SG, even at locations where it was previously very difficult to deter­mine methane emissions.

In the past, if a gas escape was discovered in an especially complex plant, its exact position could be determined by con­ducting a measurement from a second location. The time-consuming, successive point-by-point scanning and measuring of complex plants is thus a thing of the past. It is now possible to inspect great areas while simultaneously interpreting and documenting the measurement results within a few hours. Realtime moving images of the escaping gas cloud can be created by means of repeated measurements during the course of one second.

It is often desirable to be able to measure how much gas is escaping – to quantify the detected leak. Although this is not easy, even with the GasCam, the visual representation of the gas emissions has the advantage of providing an immediate estimate of the amount of gas released. Concentration measurements made using suitable monitoring devices can be taken to provide further information regarding the magnitude of the gas leaks.