American Oil and Gas Reporter - August 2016 - 37

Special Feature: Emission Requirements

Technology Automates GHG Reporting
By Hong Qin,
Paul Glaves
and Jonathan Chen
HOUSTON-Air quality mandates from
the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency,
and state and local regulatory bodies are
becoming increasingly stringent. The EPA
has increased the scope of mandatory
greenhouse gas reporting rules at the
wellhead and beyond-including gathering
systems and processing plants-in an effort
to further curb methane and other volatile
organic compound emissions from onshore
oil and natural gas production.
Automated software solutions for reporting GHG simplify managing emissions
and assure compliance. Moreover, evolving
additional analytic capabilities will provide
future benefits for field operations.
The Code of Federal Regulations 40
Part 98 addresses GHG reporting by owners and operators of onshore petroleum
and natural gas assets. Gathering lines
and boosting stations have been added to
CFR 40's Subpart W reporting requirements, which include onshore and offshore
oil and gas production, onshore gas processing, onshore gas transmission compression, underground gas storage, liquefied natural gas storage/import/export
facilities, and natural gas distribution.
Before the amendment to the GHG
reporting regulations, the Subpart W rule
pertained to production sources that annually emitted in excess of 25,000 metric
tons of carbon dioxide equivalent in onshore processing and production activity,
but excluded gathering and boosting. The
amended requirements (effective Jan. 1,
2016, for January 2017 reporting) are far
more comprehensive.
To further identify and curtail VOC
emissions, the EPA also has strengthened
its requirements with CFR 40 Part 60,
New Source Performance Standard Subpart OOOO (known as Quad O). This
updated rule focuses on new VOC sources
originating or modified after August 2011,
and shows more overlapping areas with
GHG Subpart W, such as hydraulically
fractured gas well completions.
Quad O addresses specific equipment
such as continuous bleed pneumatic controllers, reciprocating and centrifugal
compressors, leak detection equipment,
and storage vessels. Its restrictions are
more encompassing on individual classes
of equipment. For example, pneumatic
controllers must have a bleed rate of less
than 6.0 standard cubic feet of gas an

hour to comply.
These Subpart W and Quad O mandates,
and other environmental regulations, require
onshore oil and natural gas producers to
collect, quantify and report an unprecedented amount of data. As an example,
one major operator's reporting asset of
approximately 9,000 well sites has provided
an estimated 1.2 million data points-an
average of 130 elements a site.
In addition to the sheer data volume
required by added emission sources, much
of the information normally is tracked
by separate functional groups for different
purposes, and in different formats, which
complicates its collection, aggregation
and dissemination.
Data sources may include equipment
inventory of all types and their specific
attributes, such as horsepower. Gas and
condensate production on each well is
another data source, as is activity data
relating to operating and equipment run
time. These and other sources, and the
dependencies among them, must be integrated and processed to file a single com-

prehensive report.
The task of compiling and reporting
has fallen primarily to the environmental
groups at producing companies, which
largely have relied on manual customized,
macro-driven spreadsheets in the past.
Spreadsheet-based approaches may suffice
for small companies, but are neither efficient
nor effective ways for larger producers to
process the disparate data in a manner that
meets the quality assurance requirements.
An Automated Solution
In order to comply with growing EPA
GHG emission requirements, multiple
natural gas producers have turned to a
centralized data warehouse and business
logic, which through its design and creation, automates many collection, integration and quality control/quality assurance (QA/QC) processes.
Figure 1 is an example summary page
of the reporting tool, showing emission
summaries by geographic formation, while
Figure 2 shows an emissions comparison
summary of previous and current reporting

FIGURE 1
Emissions Summary by Geographic Formation

FIGURE 2
Emission Comparison Summary
(Previous and Current Reporting Years)
22,000
20,000
18,000
16,000
14,000
12,000
10,000
8,000
6,000

Pneu Pump
2015 : 8,800
2016 : 7,105

4,000
2,000
0

AUGUST 2016 37

American Oil and Gas Reporter - August 2016

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