sensors

Artificial intelligence and lost oil wells

January 2, 2025 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

There have been commercial oil and gas wells across the United States for 170 years. Researchers estimate that there are between two and three million wells that have been abandoned. There are hundreds of thousands of them, across 27 states, that are “orphaned,” meaning that they are uncapped, unproductive, and nobody is responsible to manage their leakage or pollution.

Many are undocumented orphaned wells – UOWs – that are not listed in formal records and are basically out of sight and out of mind. Besides having nobody responsible for them, nobody even knows where they are. But they are potential sources of oil and chemical leaks into nearby water sources and can send toxic substances like benzene and hydrogen sulfide into the air.

Researchers are using modern tools like drones, laser imaging, and advanced sensors to try to locate UOWs. But these wells are scattered over an area of more than three million square miles.

To better predict where to look for undocumented wells, researchers are combining historical topographic maps with artificial intelligence. The US Geological Survey has scanned 190,000 topographic maps made between 1884 and 2006. AI is being used to find the symbols for oil and gas wells on the maps. People can recognize these symbols easily, but there are just too many maps to look at. The problem is equivalent to finding a needle in a haystack; there is just an awful lot of hay to look through.

Abandoned wells are a big problem and it will take lots of modern technology to try to solve it.

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AI Helps Researchers Dig Through Old Maps to Find Lost Oil and Gas Wells

Photo, posted August 16, 2022, courtesy of Larry Syverson via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio

Offshore wind and the wake effect

May 28, 2024 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Electricity demand in the U.S. continues to grow and, in the summer, homes and businesses crank up their air conditioning which drives demand even further. Many East Coast cities are banking on offshore wind projects that are underway in the Atlantic Ocean to help meet that growing demand. The first offshore turbines are now producing power off the coasts of Massachusetts and New York.

Electric power utilities need to know how much power they can get from offshore wind farms, and this is not that easy to predict. Wind is variable, so there is some built-in uncertainty. But there is also a phenomenon known as the wake effect to contend with.

When wind passes through a series of giant turbines, the ones in front extract some energy from the wind and, as a result, the wind slows down and becomes more turbulent behind the turbines. So, the downstream turbines get slower wind and may produce less power.

A study by the University of Colorado has modeled this phenomenon for planned wind farms in the Atlantic Coast region and has found that power output could be reduced by over 30%. Researchers are installing weather monitors and radar sensors in islands off the New England coast to better understand the behavior of the wind in the area and improve prediction models.

The New England grid covers Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont. Even with the wake effect, offshore wind is predicted to be able to provide 60% of the electricity needs of the grid, but it is important to be able to accurately predict what it can produce.

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How much energy can offshore wind farms in the US produce? New study sheds light

Photo, posted August 31, 2022, courtesy of Nina Ali via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio

Detecting dangerous chemicals with plants

December 11, 2023 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Researchers at University of California Riverside have been studying how to enable plants to sense and react to a chemical in the environment without damaging their ability to function in all other respects. Why do this? The idea is to be able to use plants as environmental sensors that can detect the presence of harmful substances.

The impetus for the work is presence of a protein in plants that senses a plant hormone called abscisic acid (or ABA) that helps plants acclimate to environmental changes. During drought, plants produce ABA causing the plant to produce ABA receptor proteins that close pores in its leaves and stems, keeping in moisture.

The UCR researchers demonstrated that these ABA receptor proteins can be trained to bind to chemicals other than ABA. This ability enabled them to create sensors for many chemicals, including banned pesticides.

In their recent publication, they demonstrated a green plant that turns bright red in the presence of azinphos-ethyl, a banned pesticide. The goal is to easily detect chemicals in the environment from a distance. A field of these plants would provide an obvious visual indicator of the use of a banned pesticide. The researchers also demonstrated the ability to turn a variety of yeast into a sensor that could respond to two different chemicals at the same time.

Ultimately, it would be extremely valuable to design plants that sense dozens of chemicals to they could be used as living sensors that persist for years and provide environmental information. The sensor plants are not being grown commercially at this time. That will require regulatory approvals that are likely to take years. But the discovery opens up real possibilities.

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Plants transformed into detectors of dangerous chemicals

Photo, posted August 29, 2013, courtesy of the United Soybean Board via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio

Methane Leaks Are Worse Than We Thought | Earth Wise

May 4, 2022 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Methane leaking from oil and gas wells is a real problem for the environment because methane is far more potent at trapping heat than carbon dioxide. The EPA has estimated that about 1.4% of the methane produced by wells nationally leaks into the atmosphere. However, environmental experts and energy industry engineers have been concerned that leaks from mines, wells, refineries, storage facilities, and pipelines are vastly underreported. But until recently, there really wasn’t a good way to find out.

Researchers at Stanford University have developed a technique based on the use of hyperspectral cameras mounted to airplanes. The cameras measure sunlight reflected off of chemicals in the air that are invisible to the human eye. Each chemical, including methane, has a unique fingerprint. Using these sensors, methane is easy to spot and the technique can measure the output of individual wells.

The researchers performed a study of almost every oil and gas asset in the New Mexico Permian Basin, one of the largest and highest-producing oil and gas regions in the world. They surveyed the sites for an entire year. They estimate that more than 9% of all methane produced in the region is being leaked into the skies, far more than EPA estimates.

The positive outcome of the survey is that the researchers found that fewer than 4% of the 26,000 sites studied produced half of all the methane emissions observed. Being able to identify the so-called super-emitter sites and dealing with them could lead to a major improvement in the situation.

The new technique is more accurate, faster, and more cost-effective than current ways to monitor emissions.

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Stanford-led study: Methane leaks are far worse than estimates, at least in New Mexico, but there’s hope

Photo, posted July 10, 2016, courtesy of Ken Lund via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

Global Light Pollution

October 14, 2021 By EarthWise 1 Comment

Light pollution is excessive or obtrusive artificial light. It’s a consequence of industrial civilization. Too much artificial light can cause a host of problems, including disrupting ecosystems, causing adverse health effects, and wasting energy.

According to a new study led by researchers from the University of Exeter in the U.K., global light pollution has increased by at least 49% over 25 years. But this figure only includes light visible via satellites. Scientists estimate that the true increase may be significantly higher – up to 270% more globally.

That’s because there is a hidden impact of LED technology that isn’t accounted for in the satellite data. LEDs emit more blue light than previous lighting technologies, but satellite sensors fail to pick up this blue light. This leads to a large underestimate of global light pollution.

The researchers examined light pollution from 1992 to 2017. They found persistently increasing light pollution in Asia, South America, Oceania and Africa. In Europe, detected light increased until around 2010, after which it leveled off. In North America, artificial light appears to be on the decline. However, the researchers point out that the satellites inability to detect blue light of LEDs means that light pollution has likely actually increased in most locations.

Light pollution has widespread impacts on both animals and plants. For example, light pollution can confuse the migratory patterns of animals and change predator-prey relationships. It’s also been shown to cause trees to bud earlier in spring.

While there’s no off switch for the planet, there are ways that we could reduce the amount of light drastically with little impact on our lives.

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Rapid increase in global light pollution

Photo, posted November 2, 2008, courtesy of Timothy Tsui via Flickr.

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Finding Methane Leaks from Space | Earth Wise

December 23, 2020 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

There is growing concern about the climate effects of methane leaking from oil and gas wells. The 20-year global warming potential of methane is 84, meaning that over a 20-year period, it traps 84 times more heat per mass unit than carbon dioxide. Global methane concentrations have increased by nearly a factor of 3 since the industrial revolution.

More than a century of oil and gas drilling has left behind millions of abandoned wells, many of which are leaching pollutants into the air and water. In the U.S. alone, more than 3.2 million abandoned oil and gas wells emitted 280,000 tons of methane just in 2018. And the data is incomplete.

Part of the problem is finding out which wells are leaking. Ground-based sensors or airplanes and drones are effective ways to find leaks but considering how many wells there are to check, the costs are considerable, and the process is time consuming and complicated.

New technology is coming along that uses satellites to detect methane leaks. A Canadian company called GHGSat recently used satellites to detect what it has called the smallest methane leak ever seen from space and has begun selling data to emitters interested in pinpointing leaks.

Another company, New York-based Bluefield Technologies, plans a group of satellites for launch in 2023 that promises even finer resolution. The Environmental Defense Fund, with support from Jeff Bezos’ Earth Fund, plans to launch MethaneSAT in the next couple of years, which is designed to find small sources of methane.

Research at Stanford University determined that just 5% of methane leaks produce around half the total leakage.

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New Technology Claims to Pinpoint Even Small Methane Leaks From Space

Photo, posted June 8, 2011, courtesy of Jeremy Buckingham via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

A Room-Temperature Superconductor | Earth Wise

November 18, 2020 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

One of the Holy Grails of science has apparently been found: a room-temperature superconductor. In a paper recently published in Nature, scientists from the University of Rochester and collaborators announced that they had observed superconductivity at 59 degrees Fahrenheit in an exotic material they produced in the laboratory.

Superconductivity is a phenomenon occurring in certain materials characterized by the total absence of electrical resistance. Current flowing in a closed loop of superconducting wire can go on forever. Superconductors have other unique characteristics as well, all of which combine to make them quite useful in a number of applications. Superconductors are used in high-powered magnets in particle accelerators and in MRI machines. They continue to be developed for use in electrical power transmission, energy storage, communication filters, magnetic sensors, and more.

The problem with superconductors is that they only work at very low temperatures. For most of a century – after superconductivity was discovered in 1911 – those temperatures were very close to absolute zero: 459 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. (In the late 1980s, so-called high-temperature superconductors were discovered. Those materials superconduct at the temperature of liquid nitrogen: about 320 degrees below zero).

The dream has been to find a superconductor that works at ambient temperatures. The Rochester team has produced tiny amounts of a mysterious combination of hydrogen, carbon, and sulfur which, when subjected to extraordinarily high pressures (over 2 million atmospheres), superconducts at the temperature of a pleasant fall day.

There is no practical value for this first room-temperature superconductor, but it proves that superconductivity can exist at ambient temperature. Once something is shown to exist at all, there is reason to hope that it can occur in ways that are easier and more practical to attain.

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First room-temperature superconductor excites — and baffles — scientists

Photo, posted June 18, 2013, courtesy of Oak Ridge National Laboratory via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

Better Radar For Cars | Earth Wise

August 14, 2020 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Major automakers as well as dedicated specialized companies are actively developing autonomous vehicle technology. Many cars already offer varying degrees of self-driving capability. These vehicles have a variety of sensor systems that allow them to detect other objects on the road. Many rely on lidar or on cameras using visible or near-infrared light and these sensors do a pretty good job of preventing collisions. But all of these systems are pretty much limited to detecting objects within a car’s line of sight. Of course, human drivers have the same limitation. We can’t see things hidden around corners or blocked by other objects.

Researchers at Princeton University have developed an automated system that will allow cars to peer around corners and spot oncoming traffic and pedestrians. The system uses Doppler radar to bounce radio waves off of surfaces such as buildings and parked automobiles. The radar signal hits a surface at an angle and its reflection bounces off much like a cue ball hits the wall of a pool table. The reflected signal then hits objects hidden around the corner. Some of that radar signal bounces back to be detected by sensors on the car. In this way, the system can see objects around the corner and even tell whether they are moving or stationary.

This new technology could easily be integrated into today’s vehicles. It would enable cars to see objects that current sensor systems cannot record. For example, it would allow a self-driving vehicle to see around a dangerous intersection.

The system will require further development, refinement, and testing before it can find its way into our vehicles, but it does represent yet another way that self-driving technology may ultimately result in a safer transportation system.

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