Sensing and Data Fusion for Fugitive Greenhouse Gas Emissions

This talk addresses scientific and technical challenges to identifying and quantifying fugitive methane and hydrogen emissions along the production, transmission and end use segments of their respective supply chains.   We will examine a Bayesian inference approach built around a probabilistic view of turbulent transport applied to stationary and mobile measurements of methane and hydrogen concentrations.   Feature-level and decision-level data fusion approaches will be examined for accumulating evidence made from measurements over complex landscapes with shifting environmental conditions.  Additionally, an information-theoretic sensor path-planning algorithm will be demonstrated for scaling the approach from the single well to the region or enterprise.  It is based on a principle of maximum expected entropy reduction in the fugitive source distribution, conditioned on wind fields, associated dispersion, and prior sensor measurements.    

John Albertson is a Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Cornell University.  After receiving his undergraduate degree in Civil Engineering in 1985 he worked for six years in the electric power industry as a Project Engineer in Transmission Line Engineering.  During that period he attended business school in the evenings, earning an MBA, and also obtained his Professional Engineers license (CT).  In 1991 he left industry to return to academia, earning a Masters from Yale University in 1993 and a Ph.D. from the University of California Davis in 1996.   Albertson was on the faculty at the University of Virginia from 1996 to 2001 and at Duke University from 2002 to 2015, before joining the Cornell faculty in July of 2015.  While at Duke he was the department chair of Civil and Environmental Engineering from 2009-2015.  Albertson's research is directed toward the development of a comprehensive understanding of the exchange rates of mass, energy, and momentum between the land and atmosphere.  Applications of his work range from climate impacts on hydrology to methane emissions in oil and gas operations, and more recently space-time mapping of air quality in urban settings.