New technology can help monitor, manage and minimise methane leaks

More or less every day, several light aircraft operated by Kairos Aerospace take off from an airport in Odessa, Texas, right in the heart of America’s Permian basin—and thus of its shale-oil and -gas industry. They fly low, at about 1,000 metres, their cameras scanning what passes beneath them. But they are not looking at the ground. They are looking at the air just above that ground. They are designed to detect the tell-tale infrared signature of methane as it escapes from leaks at wells, along pipelines or in storage facilities. Every day they find some. “We can image the plumes directly, tell you how big they are, and exactly where they are coming from,” says Steve Deiker, the firm’s co-founder.