Google Street View Cars Are 'Mapping the Invisible': Methane Leaks
In the vast web of natural gas pipes beneath America's streets, leaks are a persistent challenge. In addition to wasting a source of energy, leaked natural gas (which is mostly methane) is a powerful greenhouse gas and a significant contributor to climate change. The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) and Google Earth Outreach have joined forces to find an efficient way to find and assess leaks under our streets. They are exploring the potential of new sensing and analytical technologies to measure key environmental data, and to make that data more widely available. The initial project uses sensors attached to Google Street View cars to create detailed maps of places where natural gas is leaking from utility pipes under city streets.
Transcript
00:00:00 [Music] these natural gas lines that carry natural gas to our homes are buried three or 4 feet beneath the ground and when they have a break the natural gas starts to leak out and make its way to the surface and up into the atmosphere methane is a very potent greenhouse gas over the first 20 years it's 84 times more potent than carbon
00:00:23 dioxide and while most of these leaks are not an immediate safety threat they are a threat to the environment working together with DF and Colorado State University we equipped a handful of street view cars with methane analyzers and we've been driving around uh select US cities for the past few years now when the street view car drives around it's capturing 360° panoramic imagery
00:00:44 but with this project on top of that it's also measuring methane concentration every half second as the car drives down the street my role in this project is to look at the data that comes from these methane analyzers and to try to interpret that in light of natural gas leaks we're able to identify natural gas leaks throughout the Distribution Systems in cities and
00:01:05 measure how much methane is coming out from each of these leaks natural gas pipeline replacement projects like this are happening across the country throughout the year and they're expensive one of the goals of our project is to inform utilities about where the leakiest pipelines are so they can Target the replacement effort on those lines essentially we're turning
00:01:26 the street view Fleet into an environmental sensing platform so all the analysis of the of the air samples is done back here where we have this High Precision methane analyzer and this is where the air is analyzed it's drawn from the intake tubing in the front bumper by this pump and then there's a high Precision GPS unit on the rooftop all the data that's collected by these
00:01:45 instruments is analyzed by a computer that resides up on the driver's seat we take that data and run it through an algorithm that shows us not only where the leaks are but also how big the leaks are the result is a Google map on the DF website where anyone can go and see where these methane leaks are happening the environmental defense fund has been very focused and brought this
00:02:08 this problem of methane to the four and so that partnership is incredibly powerful this technology I think of as like having glasses we're finally able to see natural gas leaks For the First Time The methane mapping project puts information in the hands of utilities and Regulators in New Jersey the regulator and utility have in inated the data from
00:02:31 our project to prioritize nearly a billion dollars worth of infrastructure investment natural gas lines are everywhere that people are but they're buried and they're invisible what is exciting to me about our research is that we're making this infrastructure and the problems with this infrastructure visible to other people people often hear about climate change
00:02:51 and think that it's a very remote far away issue but this is one case where everyone can support local action that will make a difference [Music]