Gas detectives
20 May 2014
Tighter safety regulations are forcing companies to consider new ways of keeping tabs on gases.
As governments around the world continue to clamp down on the management of hazardous environments, one of the emerging fronts in this battle is gas detection.
Officials have begun handing out heavy fines to those that flout safety and environmental regulations, says ARC Advisory Group senior analyst, Inderpreet Shoker.
A high-profile example is British oil company BP, which has paid out $4.5 billion (£2.7 billion) in fines since its Deepwater Horizon rig explosion at Macondo Prospect.
As a result, companies operating within hazardous environments are starting to diversify their use of gas detection technologies.
“In a complex hazardous environment, one single technology may not offer a high level of assurance regarding safety,” says Shoker.
“By diversifying, shortcomings of one type of technology are overcome by the strengths of other ones, to reduce the chances of undetected leaks.”
One detection technology that may soon become mandatory in certain hazardous environments is optical gas imaging (OGI).
Most OGI cameras are used in the refining of mineral oil and gas sectors where they are used to spot volatile organic compounds (VOC) and hydrocarbon (HC) gas leaks, says Steve Beynon, business development manager at FLIR.
“An OGI camera is an infrared camera that has been specifically tuned - using cooling and ideally cold filtering technology - to the wavelength that certain gas groups will absorb in the infrared spectrum,” he says.
“The resulting energy absorption is ‘visualised’ by the camera, so in effect the user will see the gas as a ‘smoke plume’.”
The technology can also be used in the petrochemical sector to detect ethylene or ammonia, the steel industry for carbon monoxide, and electrical utilities for sulfur hexafluoride (SF6).
Tracking leaks of hydroflurocarbons (HFC) and chloroflurocarbons (CFC) in refrigeration environments is another application where the technology can be applied, says Beynon.
The only current regulation compelling use of this technology is set by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the US for the oil & gas industry and fracking industries, he adds.
“In Europe we are waiting for the European Commission to finalise the Best Available Techniques Reference Document (BREF) for the Refining or Mineral Old & Gas sector,” says Beynon.
This document is widely expected to result in new EU regulations compelling processing facilities and related sectors to use an OGI camera as part of their leak detection and repair programme.
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