Estimating the Below-Ground Leak Rate of a Natural Gas Pipeline Using Above-Ground Downwind Measurements: The ESCAPE Model.

Natural gas (NG) leaks from below-ground pipelines pose safety, economic, and environmental hazards. Despite walking surveys using handheld methane (CH) detectors to locate leaks, accurately triaging the severity of a leak remains challenging. It is currently unclear whether CH detectors used in walking surveys could be used to identify large leaks that require an immediate response. To explore this, we used above-ground downwind CH concentration measurements made during controlled emission experiments over a range of environmental conditions. These data were then used as the input to a novel modeling framework, the ESCAPE model, to estimate the below-ground leak rates. Using 10-minute averaged CH mixing/meteorological data and filtering out wind speed < 2 m s/unstable atmospheric data, the ESCAPE model estimates small leaks (0.2 kg CH h) and medium leaks (0.8 kg CH h) with a bias of -85%/+100% and -50%/+64%, respectively. Longer averaging (≥3 h) results in a 55% overestimation for small leaks and a 6% underestimation for medium leaks. These results suggest that as the wind speed increases or the atmosphere becomes more stable, the accuracy and precision of the leak rate calculated by the ESCAPE model decrease. With an uncertainty of ±55%, our results show that CH mixing ratios measured using industry-standard detectors could be used to prioritize leak repairs.