Over the past 2 years, MiQ-certified operators, and the burgeoning community of operators evaluating certification, have been at the very forefront of the oil and gas industry in deploying advanced monitoring and measurement technologies. MiQ’s certification approach has also been an effective forcing mechanism at deploying these technologies at scale. Examples include frequent aircraft and drone-based surveys up to 12x per year and deployment of continuous monitoring devices at hundreds of wellpads in a basin. These deployments have:
- considerably increased the knowledge around operator-specific emissions,
- advanced knowledge around the optimized use of advanced emissions detection technology in emissions monitoring programs, and
- been used to further assure methane intensities through the first completions and independent verifications of methane emissions reconciliation.
Our community of operators, auditors and technology providers have approached the MiQ certification process with remarkable integrity, transparency, and rigor.
We have continually received feedback from operators and auditors regarding how streamlined documentation could expedite the use of different types of monitoring technology programs to meet MiQ’s requirements for multi-tiered technology deployment programs. Per Section 3.2.3 of the Monitoring Technology Deployment subsidiary document, “Demonstration of equivalent emissions detection and mitigation capabilities from a substitute or Equivalent LDAR program utilizing a combination of aerial, ground-based, continuous monitoring, or other methods for a given Facility may be provided using accepted equivalency models or simulation (tools).”
To expedite the use of equivalency modeling to meet and demonstrate certification criteria, MiQ has published the MiQ Equivalency Table. The MiQ Equivalency Table presents an initial menu of several dozen programs modeled using LDAR-Sim for the onshore production segment and representing the wide variability in basin-wide emissions distributions. Programs vary in critical modeling inputs and ultimately output a Facility score that can be used in a MiQ grade determination. These simulations are some of the first to compare how methods with various detection sensitivities and frequencies can be compared against one another.
We invite you to review our results and the accompanying methodology. MiQ’s science and technology team can also help your company understand how this work applies and can help inform your company’s emissions monitoring and quantification strategies.