Kairos Aerospace conducting Permian-wide scan in search for methane leaks

Drones may be filling the skies these days, but one company sees a more efficient way to scan the Permian Basin for emissions. Kairos Aerospace is attaching pods with its LeakSurveyor Methane Imager to the Cessna airplanes that fly around the region. less Drones may be filling the skies these days, but one company sees a more efficient way to scan the Permian Basin for emissions. Kairos Aerospace is attaching pods with its LeakSurveyor Methane Imager to the ... more Photo: Courtesy Photo Photo: Courtesy Photo Image 1 of / 7 Caption Close Kairos Aerospace conducting Permian-wide scan in search for methane leaks 1 / 7 Back to Gallery

Aircraft have been flying over Permian Basin energy operations for decades, mapping pipeline routes and checking for pipeline or tank battery leaks and emissions.

Drones may be filling the skies these days, but one company sees a more efficient way to scan the Permian Basin for emissions. Kairos Aerospace is attaching pods with its LeakSurveyor Methane Imager to the Cessna airplanes that fly around the region.

"We fly two or three planes daily in the Permian Basin; we're flying out of Midland-Odessa airports," Steve Deiker, Kairos chief executive officer and co-founder, said in a phone interview.

He said Cessnas, the most common plane in the world and widely available for lease, can cover 50 to 100 square miles compared to the three or four miles a drone can cover, and the company's imaging spectrometer detects methane plumes from 3,000 feet at 120 miles per hour.

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Deiker said one of his company's clients is Pioneer Natural Resources, which had Kairos survey its assets last year and will have the company do so again this year.

In talking with customers or potential customers, he said "everyone we talk to wants to stop gas leaks – they're a safety hazard and they cost the operator. The challenge is knowing where to look and where to do maintenance."

Rather than doing scans of specific assets for individual customers, Kairos has also launched a program to scan the entire Permian Basin for methane leaks and then sell that information to its customers.

"It's more efficient to do the scan one time and then parcel that data out to operators – they're so intermingled," he said.

The company has completed a scan of the New Mexico portion of the Permian, covering 10,859 square miles and collected methane imagery of all oil and gas facilities, including 33,02 active wells. The company has now expanded into the West Texas portion of the Permian. The goal is to do the Permian-wide scans on a quarterly basis in the next couple of years, he said.

"What we've seen is, (having scanned) over 17,000 wells and infrastructure, we can safely say the vast majority of wells are not leaking at all," said Deiker. "There's only a small number of leaks that are significant – at most 3 percent of the infrastructure has significant leaks. Once we know that, it makes it easier to fix them."

He estimates that more than 6 billion cubic feet of methane has been identified and more than 41 percent of those emissions have been repaired, resulting in emissions reductions of 80 percent. More importantly, he said, the return on investing in the scans is 175 percent.

Kairos utilizes a cloud-based system to quickly analyze the data and generate reports for its customers.

"We need to process huge amounts of data quickly," said Deiker. "Our cloud-based system spins up computers that can analyze the data quickly. It can analyze up to 150 square miles a day. It automatically finds the leaks for us and we can make reports available to our customers quickly."

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While the company earmarks its data for paying clients, Deiker said if a leak is found near a home, business or school, "we pick up the phone and call the operator immediately, whether they're a customer or not."

Both Deiker and Kairos co-founder Brian Jones once worked for Lockheed Martin, laying the groundwork for Kairos.

"We always felt there was a need, or a market, for data from aerospace sources," Deiker said. "In our research, we found operators were looking for ways to find leaks. They're under pressure from investors, from landowners, from the public, to find these leaks. We dove into research and found the majority of emissions were from large emitters. We could construct an instrument and a program to identify these leaks. By concentrating on big leaks, we're thinking of the business interests of the operators. Small leaks involve small amounts of gas and not really impactful on the environment. Our focus is on 50,000 cubic feet of gas or more. Fixing them quickly reduces emissions and saves the operator money."

By seeing the whole picture, he said operators can find the best solution to the methane leaks.

The company is active not only in the Permian Basin but in the Fayetteville play and is also active in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, California and Colorado as well as Alberta, Ontario, Canada. Deiker said the company will begin operations next year in the Middle East and in North Africa.

"It seems like there's a lot of interest from the industry, and as long as there's interest, we hope to provide data," he said.