Grant: Engage Grants Program

ATCO provides safe, reliable delivery of natural gas to more than 1.2 million customers. Over the past twodecades, the company has not significantly adjusted its monitoring techniques and available tools haveimproved. ATCO wishes to study optimizing a combination of walking and mobile vehicle leak detectiontechniques to reduce costs while retaining or improving efficacy. Field experiments will be used to testresolution with the present industry-standard tools. Prior to this it will be necessary to form model-basedexpectations based on Gaussian plume modeling for the interpretation of results. Experiment results andeconomics data for monitoring will be combined to establish the lowest cost combination that still meetsacceptable certainty and confidence levels. This three-part project entails: 1)Computer-based experiments.StFX will conduct model experiments to predict relative behavior of mobile detection tools underrepresentative conditions and understand detection opportunites and relative detection ranges for the detectiontools in seasonal, day/night, and rural/urban contexts; 2)Field based experiments A) StFX will coordinatecontrolled natural gas release tests using both walking and driving methodologies simultaneously. B)Double-blind tests will guide the optimal relative use of each technology under a range of circumstances;3)Data Interpretation: StFX will create a report combining field trial results with economics data (cost per km,time) of each approach and establish the lowest cost combination that meets ATCO's certainty/confidencerequirements.