Engineering Code for the Climate

by Ray Mistry, CTO

ray mistry blog

Measurement and validation are the only way to achieve net-zero. My engineering and science team are working to measure and quantify emissions for the energy value chain — they’re invisible, geographically dispersed, intermittent, and massively important when it comes to alerting the course of climate change. We are building the technology ecosystems to connect IoT devices in exploration and production basins across the US that report to a SaaS dashboard every 60 seconds detecting methane down to <1 ppm. That level of fidelity is new. The connectivity and technology push the boundaries of “how it’s always been done” and mean that the technologists, engineers, and operators are all learning and deploying something new.

To achieve something that ambitious, we needed a team willing (and able) to create an entire category of climate tech. Our goal has always been to advance the conversation around O&G and accurate emissions measurement. Today, when so many of us rely on data to measure and benchmark personal and business progress, we started with a simple position: help our customers better understand their emission profile and remediation approaches with the same accuracy.

Previously, poor imagery of well pads and facilities lacked a depiction of emission sources. Our fieldwork started with spinning up a fleet of drones and a workstream allowing for more accurate fluid dynamics simulations of a site to better account for the effects of site topography in localization and quantification calculations.

We furthered our research around emissions detection and the algorithms used by dedicating more time at METEC under exclusive testing and participating in the ADED protocol.

Today, Project Canary has made significant strides in Product development. We have revamped our emissions detection approach and can now detect 5-9 times (or 500% to 900%) more emissions on a given pad. We have 1200 Canary units deployed and deliver terabytes of data and analysis to 52 customers.

Smart Alerts remove the need for customers to define a fixed concentration threshold for alerting and instead utilize a machine learning algorithm trained on the specific operational and atmospheric conditions of a site. This allows our alerting engine to automatically differentiate between fugitive emissions that require operator attention and expected operational emissions, significantly reducing noise in alert notifications while also ensuring that leaks and fugitive emission events are identified as quickly as possible. Smart Alerts continue to learn and improve automatically as more data is collected, and customers can guide and enhance the learning process by flagging notifications that do not provide value.

What’s next? Join the team and find out.

About Project Canary

Project Canary is a climate technology company that offers an enterprise emissions data platform that helps companies identify, measure, understand, and act to reduce emissions across the energy value chain. Given its outsized impact, the Company started with methane and has since expanded to other greenhouse gasses. Project Canary’s mission is to Measure It — leveraging sophisticated software solutions to help companies improve and report on their emissions footprint. They do this by building high-fidelity sensors, ingesting data from various other technologies and sources, characterizing the accuracy of such emissions data, and deploying advanced physics-based AI-powered models to identify leaks and quantify emissions.
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