Team:IISER-Bhopal-India/Problem
Why Methane ?
Accidental gas leakages have historically been disastrous for societal well being. One of the most notable cases being that of Bhopal Gas Tragedy 1984, which took hundreds of lives in the very city we hail from. Thus, our idea for this year's iGEM project focused on detecting these fugitive emissions and leakages. Upon searching for potential gaseous candidates, we came across Methane- a highly flammable and toxic gas with far-reaching impacts on climate due to its extremely concerning global warming potential that is 25 times more than that of CO2.[1,2] Because of its toxicity and flammable nature , methane is an occupational hazard for workers involved in biogas plants and cleaning sewage or septic tanks. The first step for developing intervention strategies to reduce methane burden is by monitoring its concentrations in the atmosphere.
This would be best achieved by developing a reliable, eco friendly, cheap and portabale device for monitoring local atmnostpheric methane concentrations which led us to formulate the idea for MethNote.
Methane Leakages - Heavy Losses, Punishing Effects
Methane has a variety of applications, most importantly in the ever insatiable energy sector. One of the biggest anthropogenic contributors to the increasing levels of atmospheric methane is leakage losses, which may be due to a lot of reasons ranging from faulty industrial equipment, ill-maintained pipelines, antiquated spillover control systems, or even due to a simple lack of prompt intervention and control strategies. For instance, even at an emission rate (derived by dividing the amount of methane emitted each year, by the total amount of methane pumped out of the ground each year from natural gas and oil wells) of just over 2.3%, the U.S. Oil and Gas industry was responsible for the generation of 2.3 million metric tons of methane emissions last year[3,4]. Further perspective can be gained from the fact that in the U.S. alone, there are over 2 million miles of pipelines - that is over 80 times the distance around the earth!
Source: Google
Elementary, My Dear Problems?
Understandably, given such a large framework and widespread layout, there are abundant opportunities for leakages to occur.
Hence, substantial resources need to be dedicated to developing robust detection and containment strategies. Very often, a prominent bottleneck in this regard arises within the very first prerequisite itself - accurately detecting a leakage and pinpointing its location. Keeping in mind the complexity and span of the methane distribution systems currently in place, it is imperative that any such detection system has at least the following basic properties - reasonable levels of precision, low environmental risks/load, cost-efficient, low-maintenance and high versatility. Contemporary sensors all face limitations in at least some, and frequently most, of the above criteria. Hence, a possible solution would be best achieved by developing a reliable, eco friendly, cheap and portable device for monitoring local atmospheric methane concentrations which led us to formulate the idea for MethNote.
References:
1. Wahlen, M., 1993. The global methane cycle. Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences, 21(1), pp.407-426.2. Boucher, O., Friedlingstein, P., Collins, B. and Shine, K.P., 2009. The indirect global
warming potential and global temperature change potential due to methane oxidation.
3. Schwartz, John. and Plumer, Brad. (2018) 'The Natural Gas Industry Has a Leak Problem', The New York Times, 21 June
4. Chepkemoi, Joyce (2017) 'Top 20 Countries By Length Of Pipeline', worldatlas, 25 April