There's a new report, dated 06MAY 2021, entitled, "Global Methane Assessment: Benefits and Costs of Mitigating Methane Emissions" that can be downloaded from the United Nations Environment Programme website using the URL below.
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Natural gas systems for residential heating and cooking are in the news again (recall it was 2018 when a number of homes exploded in Lawrence, MA; later attributed to faulty pipework). An article in the American Geophysical Union's EOS publication (21MAY21) discusses the longer-term demise of street trees in the Beacon Hill neighborhood in Boston being attributed to natural gas system leaks in subsurface. There's a neat story here between the science of monitoring methane and translating this to action that protects human health (and safety) and the environment via both grassroots activism and policy-making. The attached PDF is the full EOS article that references journal papers, in case URL does not work.
Related sites:
Gas Leaks Allies: https://www.gasleaksallies.org/who-we-are
The Surprising Root of the Massachusetts
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Once again this year, Professor Holmen has challenged the ME/EE seniors at UVM to design a robust low-cost instrument package that can be used from a drone to monitor real-world emissions of biogases, with 1Hz sampling frequency, and send the data in real-time to the drone operator. Team 12 started by reviewing documents from prior work, with additional mentoring from two of last year's Team 24 students (Trevor and Jack). This year's team has one EE and 3 ME seniors, with creative design ideas and diverse perspectives on the problem. We are using the same low-cost sensors from Figaro, Senseair, BME and Alphasense, but a completely different design emerged by the end of Winter Break 2020 (see drawing). Looking forward to being able to actually get Team 12 into the lab for calibrations by the end of February 2021.
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