The current discussion around the climate impact of industrial greenhouse gas emissions is centered around measurement of actual emissions rather than the traditional estimation techniques. The future oil and gas production facility will have to take into consideration the objective of eliminating or at least minimizing GHG emissions and to demonstrate that requirement through specific measurement and reporting techniques. The phrase “Measure what Matters” is becoming more common as environmental NGO as well as regulators better understand the limits to  previous reporting methods. Approaches to measurement range from satellites to aircraft surveys, to drone inspection surveys to various types of continuous monitoring and ultimately to operations procedures like LDAR (leak detection and repair) and use of FLIR (forward looking infrared) thermal camera surveys will have to be adopted. Measure what Matters is even one of the pathways in the SPE (Society of Petroleum Engineers) Gaia framework. We at the Payne Institute of Public Policy have coined the term Digital Canopy for Emissions Detection to try and frame the advantages and limitations of these various techniques and to begin to reconcile the top down and bottoms up measurements to develop a way to more accurately measure emissions and to help operators more proactively identify, locate fugitive emissions leaks and to quantify the size and impact of the largest “super-emitter” events.

Jim Crompton is retired from Chevron in 2013 after almost 37 years with the major international oil & gas company. Jim established the Reflections Data Consulting LLC to continue his work in the area of data management and analytics for Exploration and Production industry. He is a frequent speaker at Society of Petroleum Engineers conferences on Digital/Intelligent Energy and the Data Foundation. His interests lie in the full spectrum of the information value chain from data capture, data management, data visualization, data access, modeling and analytics, simulations and serious gaming. Jim graduated from the Colorado School of Mines (BS in Geophysical Engineering in 1974 and MS in Geophysics in 1976) before joining Chevron in Denver, Colorado. He later earned an MBA degree (1996) from Our Lady of the Lake University (San Antonio, Texas).