- 1FAAM Airborne Laboratory, National Centre for Atmospheric Science, Cranfield, United Kingdom of Great Britain – England, Scotland, Wales (patlakomiec@gmail.com)
- 2Plymouth Marine Laboratory, Plymouth PL1 3DH, UK
- 3Department of Energy Science & Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA
- 4TotalEnergies, R&D, Air Quality Laboratory, Solaize, France
The oil and gas industry is responsible for 22% of global methane emissions (Saunois et al. 2020), yet accurately quantifying them remains a significant challenge. Oil and gas facilities often underreport methane emissions due to reliance on bottom-up estimation methods based on theoretical calculations and their susceptibility to systematic errors. Accurate top-down quantification tools for methane emission fluxes from this sector are crucial.
We evaluate a novel methodology to quantify methane emission fluxes using the commercially available dispersion model ADMS6 and airborne measurements. The model takes into consideration many parameters such as meteorology, source characteristics, and the dispersion domain topography. This complexity doesn’t implicate high demands on the computing time and the simulation time is short, up to a few minutes.
In September 2024, FAAM flew one mission during a single-blind controlled release experiment organised by Stanford University and TotalEnergies. The International Methane Emissions Observatory sponsored this experiment conducted at the TotalEnergies Anomalies Detection Initiatives (TADI) site in Lacq, southwest France. FAAM targeted three separate releases with controlled methane rates up to 60 g/s. Over 40 orbits were flown at distances at 3.5 and 9 km around the TADI site over 3 hours, at altitudes between 180 and 500 m above ground.
We present fast CO, CO2, CH4, SO2, NOx and 0.1–3 µm aerosol number concentrations and interpret the sampled emission sources. We discuss the meteorological conditions encountered during the mission and their impact on the release atmospheric dispersion modelling. We evaluate the accuracy of our quantification methodology against the known release rates and identify shortcomings and how they can be circumvented. Despite the challenging sampling conditions, we successfully detected emissions and confirmed the extent of our method validity.
How to cite: Łakomiec, P., Bauguitte, S., Monreal Campos, I., Baker, M., Sproson, D., McManemin, A., Brandt, A., Juéry, C., Blandin, V., and Jourde, J.: Validation of a methodology for methane flux quantification from an aircraft using a controlled release experiment, EGU General Assembly 2025, Vienna, Austria, 27 Apr–2 May 2025, EGU25-19193, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-19193, 2025.
