Veritas Workshop
Launched by GTI Energy in September 2021, Veritas is a collaborative initiative to develop methane emission measurement standard protocols across the gas supply chain from production sites to distribution networks. Its ambition is to set methods and rules that will support credible, transparent, and comparable emission assessments to accelerate and reward abatement efforts.
It is the link between governmental organizations such as the United Nations through OGMP and the US EPA that define and enforce requirements on the one hand and gas operators that collect data and implement abatement measures on the other hand. The challenge for Veritas is to walk the fine line between relevance and business neutrality. It both aims to provide guarantees about the quality of emission reporting and to leave operators the choice of technologies and methods that best serve their needs.
These competing goals were at the center of the workshop held at Stanford University on March 23rd and 24th which triggered animated and productive conversations on a broad range of topics. Chris Moore from GTI Energy summarized the results of the 13 demonstration projects that were intended to test the protocols, including pilots performed using Picarro technology. He highlighted the diversity of the approaches and the difficulties in comparing their results with the current version of the Veritas protocols. He recognized the need for more specific requirements and announced evolutions in the upcoming months.
A panel was dedicated to regulators’ expectations. For regulators, priorities are completeness - no missed emissions - and specificity. Their mandate is to assess overall emissions and to drive them down often set through a legislative process. The Veritas protocol is the way for them to ensure that the data are an accurate representation, and that incentives or penalties are well-designed to promote effective emission abatement.
The finance panel focused on the competition between operators. The panelists highlighted two applications of methane emission performance - methane intensity - that represents the percentage of methane released to the atmosphere compared to the amount of natural gas produced or supplied to final customers. The first application is about accounting for environmental impact in companies’ market valuation. For that, credible, transparent, and comparable emission assessments pursued by Veritas are essential. The second application is about developing a market for methane performance attributes to allow gas producers to monetize their GHG mitigation efforts through the RSG label (Responsibly Sourced Gas). Emission quantification accuracy and audibility are key for fair pricing.
Finally, Picarro’s François Rongere was on a panel along with Zach Weller from GTI and Evan Sherwin from Stanford. Zach introduced the discussion by describing the sources of uncertainties in emission quantification. The first one is sampling because of the uneven distribution of leak sizes and the time integration over the reporting period. The second one is data quality to assure that measurement errors are within the expected range. The third one is modeling errors and approximations that can substantially affect results. Then Evan focused his presentation on the intermittency that is often observed on upstream emissions and showed that current survey frequencies may not be enough to capture the time variability of emissions. On François’s side, he focused on the challenges of gas distribution networks (size, low detection limit, interferences with other sources) and explained how direct measurement with mobile quantification addresses the challenge of sampling uncertainties by quantifying all leaks and achieves tight uncertainty by leveraging a large number of detections.