$3.5M methane-emissions test site to be built at CSU
FORT COLLINS — A facility for testing new technologies for detecting methane emissions at oil and gas extraction sites will be built this fall on Colorado State University property somewhere in the Fort Collins area.
A team of CSU researchers won the $3.5 million, three-year federal grant to create and operate the national facility, the school and the Department of Energy announced on Friday. The money comes from the department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy, or ARPA-E. All the teams doing research at the site, including CSU’s, will be funded under the ARPA-E MONITOR (Methane Observation Networks with Innovative Technology to Obtain Reductions) program.
The facility will simulate a broad range of natural-gas production systems for testing technologies in real-world industry conditions. It will allow research teams from across the nation to test new technologies for enhanced sensing of methane, a potent greenhouse gas.
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“The Energy Department has invested in the methane-detection technology,” said principal investigator Daniel Zimmerle, a senior research associate at the CSU Energy Institute, in an interview with BizWest on Friday. “The cost of that detection has been lowered by an order of magnitude with some breakthrough technology. It used to be around $20,000; now it’s more like $2,000 or even $200. But what they need is a test facility to make sure those detectors are working.
“Our job is to assist in bringing these technologies to market,” he added. “We’ll help companies prove out solutions in a controlled environment prior to deployment in the field.”
The site will be located completely outside oil and gas basins, to allow for near-complete control of background and onsite emissions. But exactly where the facility will be built is yet to be determined, Zimmerle said.
“We are still working on that,” he said. “CSU has a number of properties in the Fort Collins area, and there’s some community-engagement process that we’ll have to manage as well. The site will be selected this summer, probably fairly soon.”
The facility will look “somewhat like a gas production site — almost like a movie set for an oil and gas facility,” he said, “There’ll be some gravel pads, a little bit of roadway — sort of the same type of construction that looks like putting a driveway into a rural home.
“The tallest part will be about 20 feet tall. We’re trying to simulate wind conditions and the air flow at a site.”
Bidding for the construction should take place in September or early October, he said, and the facility should be completed by mid-December because “construction is pretty minor.”
Joining Zimmerle’s CSU team will be Anthony Marchese, a professor of mechanical engineering; Jeffrey Collett, a professor of atmospheric science; Jeffrey Pierce, an assistant professor of atmospheric science; Clay Bell, a postdoctoral researcher at the CSU Energy Institute; Timothy Vaughn and Gerald Duggan, research associates at the institute; and Arsineh Hecobian, a postdoctoral researcher in atmospheric science. Partnering with the CSU researchers will be two representatives of Colorado School of Mines in Golden: Kathleen Smits, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering; and Dag Nummedal, director of CSM’s Colorado Energy Research Institute.
The facility will consist of multiple sub-facilities that simulate different operations throughout the natural-gas industry supply chain: dry gas production, wet gas production, midstream compression, metering and regulating stations, and underground pipelines.
