 Hi, good afternoon everyone. My name is Amanda Lake and I am head of Carbon and Secure Economy with Jacobs and based here in Edinburgh in Scotland. And it's a real pleasure to be hosting this webinar. And I'd like to welcome Anna Katrin and Jakob from NVDAN. And together we've been planning this series and it's really about global lessons that we can all learn from the monitoring and mitigation work for process emissions that we're seeing happening in the water sector. And in particular the focus here is Denmark because there's been some really exciting progress in Denmark and that's what we want to talk about today. So this webinar is on methane. We've got a webinar in September which Anna Katrin and Jakob will be hosting on nitrous oxide and we're really looking forward to getting started with a fantastic panel. So I'll not take too much time just to welcome everyone and in particular to thank Charles and Brander and William and the team at Iowa for hosting this. This webinar series is really a follow-on from the Climates Might Utilities workshop that was organised in Copenhagen last year at World Water Congress and really an opportunity to share the knowledge more broadly across the sector which is really important as we all consider our responsibility to take climate action. So we've got, we'll record the webinar, it will be made available along with some materials. Please raise questions in the Q&A, not the chat box. And we will have a short section for questions after each presentation but we will also have a little time at the end. And we've got an extra 10 minutes or so if we need beyond the 90 minute webinar just to wrap up if it's a particularly exciting conversation. So we've got a really fantastic line up of really certainly the Danish leaders but I would also say global leaders in methane monitoring and mitigation work. And with that I'd really just like to hand across to Charlotte to kick us off with an introduction. Here we're really learning about the national monitoring programmes that we've seen progress in Denmark. And to share this knowledge and then reflect on it together. So with that I'd like to hand across to Charlotte to introduce herself and again thank you so much all for joining and in particular to the fantastic guests we've got today. Thanks a lot. Thank you for the introduction and good morning, good afternoon everyone. My name is Charlotte Scheuss and I'm a professor at the Technical University of Denmark. I have a background in waste management and resource recovery and especially the last 15 years I've focused quite a lot on measuring emissions, that's methane emissions and also nitrous oxide emissions from many different activities in our societies and also include biogas. So with this I'll just start with giving a little bit of introduction or background to the project. And I'll try to change the slide. It's a little bit of delay on it, I see. So a little bit of background. So Denmark has invested in the expansion of biogas production in order to phase out fossil fuels. The expansion has primarily been within manure-based biogas plants that deliver an upgraded biogas. We call this biomethane to the national natural gas grid. And as you can see in this figure today the share of biomethane in the Danish gas system is relatively high, so close to soon approaching 40%. But back in 2016 some preliminary investigations had shown that there could be leaks at biogas plants and then of course methane is then lost to the atmosphere. And since biogas in Denmark has been heavily subsidized the Danish Energy Agency found that it was necessary to investigate whether the Danish biogas plants actually were leaking and losing some methane to the atmosphere. So why is this important? This is what is shown at this figure. So this figure shows methane lost and climate change impact. And what you see is that this figure should then show why it is important. So if you look at the figure shows the climate change impact in terms of greenhouse gas emissions or CO2 equivalent. And in this case it's illustrated by calculating the carbon footprint for manure-based biogas plants for manure-based biogas plant. And the positive numbers are emissions to the atmosphere and then they represent a burden to the environment. And the negative numbers on the scale here they represent a saving or a benefit to the environment. And the main savings are fossil fuel substitution. So that's the beige bar here. And then also reduced emissions due to change in the manure management. So you have lower emissions from storage of digested manure compared to raw manure. But if we then look at the emissions to the environment these consist of emissions from the use of electricity and heat. And then most important especially for today's session is the methane loss. And here you can see different calculations assuming different methane losses. And the methane loss here is the methane lost out of the total methane production. So when we go from 1% to 2% to 5% 10% and 20% loss you can see that you very quickly lose the environmental benefit in terms of climate impact when these losses approach 5, 10 and even 20% there is actually no net benefit. And when we some of the early studies that we did back in 2016 they actually showed methane losses of 2% to 5% and occasionally also 10%. That was of course a little bit concerning what is then the overall benefit of investing heavily in bio gas. So that's a little bit of a background for the project. So what was this project about? So I'm trying to change the slide here it is. So the Danish Energy Agency they initiated a study which should support both the bio gas plant operators and also the industry in general as well as the government. And concerning the bio gas plant they should get some assistance in finding their methane leaks and also have their emissions quantified and then also get a good overview of what are the possibilities of reducing or minimizing leaks and methane loss to using best available technology. And for the industry and the government the project should improve the knowledge in the field and also support that emissions were reduced and also that the national emission factors that are used in the inventory reporting should be updated and hopefully also reduced. So in the project there were two overall tasks you could say. So the first task was to build and disseminate knowledge to reduce methane losses whereas the second task focused a lot on measurements. So in the first task we developed self-control programs for the participating bio gas facilities and also made best available technology available. We did also different kind of guidance materials and so on. Then the second task as I just mentioned was focused very much on measuring emissions. So we looked both into developing best practice regarding measurements of methane emissions and also leak search on bio gas plants and then it was actually to carry out leak searches and quantify emissions at the participating bio gas plants. So in Denmark we have around 140, 44 I think existing bio gas producing plants and in total we had 60 plants signing up and participating in this project. And 35 were agricultural plants so that means that they primarily run on manure and then we had 25 wastewater treatment plants participating. And then we also had another nine plants that were included. They had been part of a monitoring program that was something that the bio gas association had initiated years earlier and we got the chance to include the emissions that these nine plant had measured early on. So I would say all in all we quantified emissions at a bit more than 50% of the total Danish bio gas productions. A variety of plants were included both in terms of the type as I already said agricultural plants centralized and decentralized agricultural plants and also wastewater treatment plant. They were very different in terms of size so how much do they produce but also in the gas utilization do they have combined heat and power or do they upgrade, do they upgrade their bio gas to biomethane? Is it used on side or off side? And we also saw a difference in terms of the construction year or the age of the plant. So one of the important things that were done was a methane leak search so they were carried out with a methane sensitive camera and processes at each individual plant. They were then searched with this camera on the basis of a planned review where we have identified all the different unit processes and the potential processes where you often find leaks and these camera measurements were sometimes supplemented with methane concentration measurements where you can use a handheld sniffer. So you can get very close to the leaks like what is shown here and when you use the camera what you see so this is an example where you record a potential leak and then you see if there is a leak you see it as a small kind of smoky plume from the leak. Of course this is not a quantitative so this can tell you whether you have a leak or not and if you are a skilled user of the camera you can maybe also say something about is it a medium, small, medium, large size leak but it will not tell you how much methane is emitted from the site. So to get the total amount of methane emitted from the site we quantified the methane emission using a tracer based method and this is what is shown in the slide. I hope it will come up. So this measurement method is a method that we developed many years ago and what it does is that you release your methane on the site. So here it is illustrated with a landfill but it could be a wastewater treatment plant or a biogas plant and the tracer is then released together with the methane and downwind you drive through the plume with some very sensitive analytical equipment that monitors both the methane and your tracer and what you then see is I hope you can see the cursor here when you drive then you hit the plume concentrations will go up and when you then leave the plume again you have this nice concentration profile measured at two meters height and you can see they are very much correlated and aligned and then you use the ratio between these two compounds to determine the emission of the methane from your site and you know you can do this because you know how much tracer you release and the image down here shows how it looks like in real size. So it's a Google Earth image and then you can see the concentrations of the tracer and the methane and here you see a biogas plant. This is a method that is very well documented. We've done many controlled release tests and international comparison tests and it's also been certified and has been applied at many, many different sources. So now to some results. So in total at these 60 plants we identified about 500 individual leaks and on average we saw that there that the leaks were a little the number of leaks was a little bit higher for agricultural plants compared to wastewater treatment plants. And the reason for this difference may be that the agricultural plants in this studies were larger and have larger biogas production capacity in comparison to the wastewater treatment plant. Yeah, so these are some of the raw data showing the whole plant methane emissions in kilo methane per hour. And then again, it's divided by agricultural plants and wastewater treatment plants. You can see that emission rates, methane emission rates, they range between very little. So just a few kilos and up to 80 kilos. And these numbers doesn't say very much. So you need to normalize the emissions and normally what you normalize with is the methane production at the individual plants. This is what you see on the next slide. So this figure shows methane losses for the different types of biogas plants. So agricultural plants and wastewater treatment plants as a function of the methane plant production. That's the x-axis here methane production. And yeah, so I said earlier, the methane loss is given as a percentage of the production. And that would then be the methane that this year of the methane that it lost to the atmosphere. And you see a wide range of methane losses from something like 40% close to less than 1%. You also see that the highest methane losses are seen for the smaller plants. So plants in this end of the scale, where with lower methane productions. And you if you look at the different symbols, so the green for the agricultural plants and the blue diamond for the wastewater treatment plants, you can see that we have many of the waste water, the Danish wastewater treatment plants, they are here with lower methane production. And this is also where we see the higher methane losses. And there are many reasons for this. But one or some of the reasons are that if we look at these very large agricultural biogas plants, many of them, they are very, they are recently built. And they are also in the business for producing energy. This is their main business. This is why they're there. Whereas the wastewater treatment plants, of course today, they also want to be climate neutral and net energy producing and so on. But their original purpose and still that's a main purpose is to treat the wastewater. One thing that is also important to notice here, we're talking about some of these relatively big methane losses is that we can also see here that it's actually technical possible to reduce the methane loss to less than 1%. So this is, I think, very important also to be aware of this. So we also calculated methane emission factors. And they are supposed to be used in the National Inventory Reporting. So they should represent the total, the total biogas production or biomethane production in Denmark. So how this is done is then that we use now production weight based methane emission factors. So this way that the emission factor is calculated is that you take the sum of all emission measured at the individual plants, you sum it up, and then you divide with the total production across all plants. And then you get this production waste based methane emission factors. And for the agricultural plant, then it's 2.1. And for the wastewater treatment plants, this is 6.7. And for if you look across all plants, it's 2.5. And this is the biogas association they had put a target of 1% methane loss from all Danish biogas production. So in comparison to this, this is actually higher. And if we look at what was used in the National Inventory Reporting for Denmark for wastewater treatment plant, the factor is 1.6. So what we measure it is a bit higher. And whereas if we look at the agricultural biogas plants, and the factor that we got here is actually lower than what was used today. Yeah, we, we then start discussing in the project whether these emissions are actually dynamic. And we didn't have any resources to focus on this, but we did manage to measure at one wastewater treatment plant we measured for six days, the emissions in the morning and then later in the day. And this is the data that you can see here and you can see that there is some variation during the week. And unfortunately, the process and regulation system didn't work this week. So we cannot really back it up and see how does this compare with the, for example, the methane production or the inlet to the wastewater treatment plant. So definitely more to look into. And then I get to the conclusion. So we see high variation in methane emissions. So and methane loss between biogas plants. We also saw that the smaller plants had higher losses than the bigger ones that are often more recently built and wastewater treatment plants they had higher methane losses than agricultural plants. And I actually did forget to say the next one. So we looking at the type of leakages. And I will come back to this later on. The most common leakages was pressure relief valves on digesters. And then especially for the wastewater treatment plants, we saw that biomass storage, especially without gas collection, was a typical source of methane at the wastewater treatment plants. And then we saw leakages at all different kinds of gas bearing components, gas storage, piping, inspection hatches and so on. I would also say in general that the methane losses were higher than we expected. But there is hope, because we could see that it is technically possible to operate a plan with a loss that is less than 1%. And, and finally, I think we need a little bit more insight into the methane emission dynamic in the future. So that was it. Thank you for listening. Thanks very much, Solada. That was a brilliant overview. And I, and then we'll, yeah, we'll have a good, a good number of follow on presentations which link well to this. But one, one question, I just, we've got probably a minute or two only, and then we'll hopefully have some time for questions at the end as well. But you mentioned the original motivation was because of the subsidies around biogas, the Danish Energy Agency wanted to understand the climate change impact. And, and that was back in 2016, I think you mentioned. And I just wanted given, I mean, it's really fantastic to see this work that's been done, and, you know, some very recent publications of these findings. This was all campaign based monitoring, but it covered a large proportion of the facilities in Denmark. Where do you see the, where do you see the trajectory going forward? How can, how can the Energy Agency use this information to, and how can the biogas producers use this information for, for climate impact, I guess, just briefly, if you wouldn't mind to answer this question. So actually part of what we were originally supposed to do was also to bring some ideas for how future regulation could be implemented in the Danish biogas industry. And we did that, but it suddenly became rather political, and then that it didn't survive into the final part, the final version of the report. And but what has been done now is that there's been some new regulations. So it is now mandatory for the biogas operator to have an external, an external company to come and measure their leaks with the cap using the camera method that I just quickly presented. And so they have to do this. And then there is also some specific things on how much time they have to fix the rate, the leaks and so on. Unfortunately, there is no requirement on having the emissions quantified. So for example, these total site methane emissions, but we have been told that they plan to redo this project in a few years from now to see how this leak, this is mandatory leak search at the different sites, how that has worked in terms of reducing emissions. Brilliant. Thanks very much. And I think we'll hear more from Thomas as well. But yeah, fantastic work. And we'll share some of the links as well to the work and hear again from Anders soon. So thank you so much a lot. And with that, I'd like to pass across to Thomas. If you could please introduce yourself first, Thomas, and then kick off, that would be great. Thank you. Thank you. My name is Thomas Hansen. I'm from Denmark, Danish Water and Wastewater Associations. I don't know if you, my video has started, I can't see it, but I hope it has. I manage data and benchmarking in in Denmark. And one of my main work is to publicize anything about the Danish water sector. And I each year make this water and features. I don't know if you have seen it, you've seen it in a short time. In addition to this work, I work a lot about energy and climate assessments. But what we are talking about today is the method legislation. I think am I in control now? I am. So my first slide is not very good because you can't read it. I know that that is a schedule of the Danish water sector. If you want to know more about how big we are, you can see this water and features, find it on our home page. Water and features. It's telling something about the Danish water sector. And Denmark is not a very big country. We only 5.8 million people. And this part over here is about the wastewater. We have about 100 wastewater companies in Denmark. We have about 650 wastewater treatment plants. They treat about 700, 800 thousand cubic meter. But what we are talking about today is the 50 wastewater treatment plants who have the biogas production. So the storyline for this new regulation is shortly there was the Danish government who started set this target on 70% reduction in 2030. The next year, the Danish Minister of Environment set a goal for the energy and climate neutrality for the Danish water sector. And our biggest scope is of course nitrous oxide and followed by the method. Later this year, we got this report she just told you about. It was not very good reading because the wastewater treatment plant had a emission at 7.7%. And it was a little bit more than we expected and the national accounting inventory report used 1.3%. But we have to do something. And furthermore later in 2021, there was COP26 in Glasgow. There was a global agreement of reducing a method. And it was signed by the Danish Minister of Energy. And he went home to his agency said, we have to do something in Denmark. So in 22, there was a climate agreement. It was called Denmark can do it more to one of the point was to increase our biogas production. So we could not using this rushes biogas and a gas we didn't want to buy anymore. And there was a regulation of medicine. So we had to so we can reduce our loss from biogas production. And this regulation was introduced here to generate the first this year. It's not a very complicated set of rules. It's actually have three main issues. The first one is that all the biogas production plants have to have a there's a requirement for a self monitoring program. And the second issue is that each year it should have a very review and leak detection of the biogas plant. And there was an issue about you would set a maximum at 1% for the gas engine and the method upgrading plants. Most of the wastewater treatment plants in Denmark who have biogas production use the biogas for producing electricity and district heating. That's why we have a gas engine and we have a emission from the engine. And as Gerard told you the gold is not to measure the total methane emission from the plant. The goal is to manage by managing the operation and maintained maintenance of the facilities. You hope you have a very good facilities and then you have a very low methane loss from the facilities. And the final goal is to end up with a mission at 1% of the biogas sector in Denmark. What is then included in this requirement? It's only the biogas production facilities on the wastewater treatment plant that's included. That means that all the aeration tanks, settling tanks, the other parts of the wastewater treatment plants, it's not included. It's first when the sludge has been through the sludge thickness and go into a reactor. It started to be included in this regulation. Then we have some gas and the gas pipes and the sludge is going through. We have some closed sludge storage and we have an open sludge storage. This is one of the main problems for the wastewater treatment plants. And then we have the dewatering and when we finish the dewatering we are going outside the regulation because if you put in internal sludge storage it's not included or when you put it on a trunk and drive it away it's not included. So it's only the biogas production plant that's included. One of the first issues was that all plants should do their self-monitoring program. The proposed was of course if you do a weekly monthly and annual self-monitoring program you find a lot of small emissions. You can fix it to know that you have a very good plant. The AGG made a template for use for this one. So everybody almost gets the same kind of self-monitoring program and the program has to be prepared in collaboration with an external company. This was one of the issues in the regulation. The other one is maybe the biggest one. There was a demand for an annual review of your plant. It should be carried out by an external independent company. All the external independent companies have to be pre-approved by the Danish Energy Agency. There's a list on the website of the agency. There are now seven companies on the list and furthermore the agency published a template for reporting and guidance on how to do this review and what should be put in the report and the review result of course in this report and the report should be sent to the of course the wastewater treatment plant but also to the Danish Energy Agency so they can follow what's what's how they do the biogas plant sorry. And then the review must be carried out every year. However there is a possibility of a couple of years that you can have a reduced frequency if you are having a wastewater treatment plant who are doing very well without any big leakage. The report there was two parts in the the the review there was the leak detection of all gas carrying components and the other one is identifying any other sources of metal losses and for the wastewater treatment plant it's often the open storage storage that's the problem. When you first build this wastewater treatment plant and you have a biogas production you build your storage as opened because then the wind could blow all the metal so you didn't have any danger for explosion. Now it's the other way around now you have to cover it and maybe and collect the air and the metal and upgrade the metal from the storage tanks too. The report must contain they have to the external company have to review the self-managing program if they find something below what we called I don't know what is called in English it's a significant limit as if it's not very much you have to put this one in your self-managing monitoring program if you are finding something about this significant limit then you have to put some recommendation for fixing it in the report and of course if you find any sources of metal or recommendation it should be put in the report too and then the requirements say that if you wastewater treatment plant get this report with findings above this significant limit they have to fix it so the agency expects that every time there's a problem the biogas production plant have to fix it this is quite nice there's of course some problems what is the definition of a significant limit how much should it be before it's above the significant limit and they have to fix it and then of course there's a problem about this external companies they have the responsibility for recommendations so you have to fix it and they have to write how to fix it but we would like that it's a wastewater treatment plant it's very fair that the report said to have a problem but it's up to the wastewater treatment plant to decide how to fix it the third part in the requirement was that there was it was planning to set up a maximum emission from the biogas from the biogas engine or the upgrading plant systems at one percent about the gas engine there was a problem two problems actually the goal was that it should be below one percent it is very it's not very easy even for a new engine or newly refurbished engine to have an emission solo it was actually almost impossible and the other part was that we have two different agency who would set up different requirement for the same emissions from the same gas engine so we have this Danish energy agency who would sit up requirement for methane in the outlet from the engine but also at the same time we have the Danish environmental agency who has the requirement for the same outlet but it's all for the noxious and this is not very good to have two agency putting up requirement for the same outlet so right now they're discussing what to do so later on we expect there will be some requirement to do this outlet from the gas engine about the upgrading plant it's 1st January 24th that's a requirement that the maximum emissions should be one percent but it's only one or two way spotter people then who have an upgrading plan for biobas. George Summary the new regulation it's very simple actually and it's based on the concept that a maintained plant and a review of the facility will ensure as little methane leakage as possible it is not chosen to make this total methane measurement as gelato told you about it's not in the requirement of course you have to kick at the point sources this is the gas engine we have our demand coming later and all this is put on the Danish website Danish energy agency websites where you also can find the guidelines and templates but I'm sorry it's only in Danish so far so I don't think you can read it this was it in the first time any questions thanks Thomas that was that was fantastic and we're so happy to be bringing this webinar in English because as you say a lot of the otherwise all of this is is in Danish so we all have to we have to learn another language to understand and I think the progressiveness of the energy agency but I guess also the the it seems like the collaborative nature of the work that's been done it's involved academia it's involved the utilities and the biogas facilities as well as as well as Danva as well as regulators it's it's very nice to see and clearly it's driving progress because now you're able to present the requirements I've got a question a question here that we might yeah we have time we have time for and actually Patrick's just raised it are the other new regulations a disincentive for utilities to build new biogas facilities or what is the landscape here you mentioned the lack of upgrading there's a lot of local use for biogas how do you see this we don't build new biogas production on waste water treatment plants I think we have all the plants we can have now all the new biogas plants will be at every culture and there will be new and big so I'm sorry I didn't I don't I don't know yeah so and what about the upgrading I mean you mentioned a lot of the use as local I think what's interesting is in some other geographies like in the UK for example there's a lot of the incentives have been to upgrade the biogas and actually depending on the upgrading technology the methane slip can be very large through different technologies yeah the upgrading is mainly for the big biogas plants many of the plants on the waste water treatment plant is too small they don't have enough biogas to finance this upgrading systems we would like to do it but it's mainly too small I think we only have two or three waste water treatment plant who have enough biogas to upgrade it otherwise you can collect it to one central upgrading plant and then you have to transport it by by trucks yeah thank you really interesting for electricity yeah um good thanks and I can see hi Steve I can see a question here which I think we'll tackle in the the final discussion as well with that I think I would like to say thank you very much Thomas and I'd like to pass back to Danish Technical University and back to Anders to introduce himself and present this really interesting case study from the work that he and Shalala have done thanks Anders yes thank you very much Amanda and so brief introduction of myself my name is Anna Fransson I'm a senior researcher at the Technical University of Denmark I work in remote sensing of future transformations and I'm my colleague of Shalala and has worked in this project that Shalala gave an overview of earlier so I have a background in environmental engineering and within that waste management and bioenergy so from now so for this presentation we are going to address a very specific subject but one that is highly important within this overall thing that we are discussing here um so at the end of my presentation is just to give an explanation on what pressure relief valves are and why they are focused focus point so I'm going to show methods and results regarding this source of emission from the Danish national effort to minimize methane emissions and then I'm going to use some other people's results so the first one is a German study that's point number three here where they have observed emission rates from installs pressure relief valves or breather valves for short and then I will use some UK results that shows that valves may leak at different rates depending on the quality of the valves I will draw some conclusions and list some additional information after the next slide please thank you so what are pressure relief valves and I think I will call them breather valves from now on because that's a bit easier so the purpose of these valves are to ensure a set maximum pressure difference between a tank such as a digester at a wastewater treatment plant and that is to prevent rupture or implosion of the tank so the the valve can either take in air or release pressure from the tank so for example if you change liquid levels in the tank you may need to draw in air or release air it could also be that there's a lot of gas production going on and not enough gas use there are probably a lot of different things that can cause these valves to open and emit excess air or the other way around to take in air from the atmosphere into the digester I'm not an expert in this but but you can consider there are two types of emissions that are these functional emissions that I am that I talk about that are the very purpose of the valve and then there are also what you can consider as leakage meaning unwanted emissions where where the pressure difference is not the cause of emission I'll go back into that so they are let's say a well-known and often observed cause of leakage from top of biogas reactors and the purpose of reducing emissions from the sources of course to avoid the contribution to climate change and also to to avoid loss of energy produced at the digester and thus revenue potentially next slide please thank you so a lot of show these figures before so in this national effort in danmark we we used thermal imaging to to identify sources of methane emission also this is the way you can measure concentration and leakage from a pressure release wells either in centers or functional emission you can say all leakage as such that was observed at more than half of facilities and 89 times in all emissions from pressure relief wells were also served now as part of the project we we did not quantify emissions from all emission sources and that includes these breather wells and so we only counted the the number of leakages and as I said that occurred in more than half next slide please however there are some results that that give an indication on what mitigation of this loss rate can mean for a biogas plant so at six biogas plants in the project we measured total methane emission before the plant had an opportunity to reduce their emission and then we measured methane emission at the plant afterwards we used the tracer gas dispersion method that you want to show before and the result was that the six plants in all they avoided loss of methane converted into a yearly rate of about 1.5 million normal cubic meters which is equal to almost 30 000 tons of CO2 per year so that is of course also a significant revenue increase and it's a very important point that some of these emission sources if you if you reduce the mission you actually can generate revenue that may possibly finance or even entirely finance emissions these mitigation actions but but anyway the loss before from these six plants were 3.7 percent and loss afterwards reduced to 2.1 percent and that is the loss rate in percent that is measured emission divided by total production at the site at all these six plants the pressure relief wells were replaced so I think I saw a question in the q and a what can we do one thing is that you can if you have leaky pressure relief wells you can exchange them and there there are some resources on payback time and that I will come back to next slide please now now I will move on to related resource from other people so recently there was a study published by two German researchers Thorsten Reineld and Jan Liebetraub where they had measured emissions from two pressure relief wells one at a main digest and and one from a covered digested storage at a biogas plant and here they they measured emission rate continuously so I cannot go into detail with the measurement method but but anyway their results was that the the emission rate was quite varying they saw some correlation between maintenance works and emission rate also some temperature effects that caused emission rates to spy so if I just explain the the figure we are looking at briefly you see time on the x-axis so that shows the whole calendar year and you see emission factors from the two wells as the bar graphs and the dark one is from the main digester and the light one is from the digested storage and you can see that at some points in time it goes all the way up to 10% of production that is of course quite unfortunate both for climate and also for financial reasons so the overall emission factor for the first year of observation was 1.8% and for the second year and after they had done some mitigation work and you can read about that in the paper shown here that they had reduced the emission factor to 0.6% I actually can't remember if they also changed the valve or if it was a management of the operation of the facility but please consult that paper for to see what was done to reduce emission now also now we go to the UK where a good work is being done and this time from the company Essentag and a person called Eward Coxson and his colleagues they have developed a test bench to test these breather valves and what they test is leakage at certain set points meaning set point is the point of pressure difference where the wind is opening so when they say that for example at 90% of the set point there you can have leakage from from good valves at almost nothing and from other valves that they refer to at bad valves not to name any bad names but that is significantly higher you can see here that is test results from a demonstration they they gave to me that they measured leakage from a good pressure relief valves at less than five cubic meters per year so practically nothing and leakage from a bad pressure relief valve at 1700 cubic meters per year which is significant now very relevant they also provided example of financials and they will of course depend on a lot of things rate of leakage the gas production of the facility energy cost and everything but they anyway they when asked they gave me an answer about cost and benefit so here they they had a price of a good valve versus a bad valve so the good valve is is more than twice as expensive but anyway the saving from reduced leakage from from these two different policy of wells was so so high then the payback time was less than a year or about 10 months so i think everybody will be satisfied with with that payback time i'm sure that is a good example in in my point of view hello to conclusions leakage from pressure relief valves is is a very often observed source of methane emission from biogas production that is probably not new to to to all of us here but just to lay that clear and that was also the result of our study and a reminder that emission can both be a result of the valve functioning as they should and it can come from leakage so it's important that you have high quality valves that are well maintained you can have highly varying rates of leakage from normal operation where very gas tight valves can have zero leakage and leakage from pressure relief wells can cause a significant loss of revenue and greenhouse gas emission so here i list some additional information that is relevant when to to this specific subject first the research paper that shall also shall also mention in the q&a that is discussing this project that we have been working on not only on relief wells and then the specific research paper by the two Germans that i mentioned here and then in emission calculator where you estimate what you lose in in in death and and money if you don't have the good valves thank you very much thanks andis that was a very very interesting case study there's a there's a few questions that i can see in the q&a box and i think one that draws some of them together is you mentioned that you know it can be that we need to we have bad valves but it can also be the operational conditions or the set points of existing valves and in your in your view or from from the interventions of those six sites i think they were valve replacements or maybe some of them were optimizations what how do how do we deal how do how do we differentiate because it appears clear we can take action now if we want to so what are the viable steps that a utility can take or a biogas facility can take to understand yeah here i'm probably not the right one to answer so so i'm a measurement specialist so i i observe the reasons and and i can't really distinguish if if it's due to function or or what it is but i can answer what i've been told about the owner of these six facilities so it it's a producer that it's the same owner of all facilities and they said that well they they they looked at the reports so they had two reports both our trace against dispersion report and the report of the leak search search and they decided that that they in their estimation it will be financially beneficial for them to exchange the the valves and they just decided to exchange everyone's all valves so i think of course they are so they want to emit as few greenhouse gases as they can but also as they told me i mean they they will start with the one that have a short payback and valves that that increases their their revenue basically so so they didn't see a problem with replacing in that in all the cases and just a follow-up question on that thank you um the tracer gas dispersion modeling i mean it's a site level a site-wide approach but actually can you tell us does it what granularity can it give us about individual valves it does not give any granularity about individual valves as it was used here so we used it to measure total methane emission from the site now including in the measurement protocol we also do a screening at the sites to determine where to release tracer gas and that but that determined the area where emission occurs but not specific emission sources so it's very good at quantifying the total emission rate doing that very precisely we've tested the accuracy of the method but it's in itself not very good at determining individual emission sources so a combination of leak search and and the quantification of social emission is in my point of view which compromise and a good combination of of measurement methods thanks very much can i give a short comment to that also because um and what was it actually that you said sorry i lost it on us i said that the combination of tracer gas is very useful yeah exactly but i mean you can also quantify emission rates from all these different leakages so what you normally do is that then you have to encapsulate the leakage and then you use a flow chamber and then you measure flow and methane concentrations and then you can get the emission rate so there are standard and iso standards to do this kind of measurements and it's for example in sweden they do this as part of their voluntary measurement program it's quite laborious but i mean there the methods they do exist but then you go by each leakage and then you quantify it in this way and we have done some studies where we worked together with people who would do these kind of measurements and then when we sum up the emission rates from all these different leakages and then we compare with the total measured emission from the side often we see that the total methane emission side is a little bit bigger in comparison to the total sum of all these small leakages and i think this is obvious because it's you do not always find all the leakages if you do a leak search with the camera there is also some sensitivity issues if the leakage is not really localized you might not see it you may not see it so of course there are and also leakages that are difficult to find because maybe they're on the top of the reactors or you know places where it's difficult to access so but there are methods out there where you can quantify emission rates from individual leakages and just one question on that from Jamesh I mean there's the optical gas imaging cameras that some witch claim to quantify or you know with some modeling software can quantify a mass emission what can you share a little on on this not so sure and i i know that that that they have tried to to do tests where you then yeah use these tests to get some yeah to calibrate you can say these cameras so you actually get emission rates or flow rates so i would not dare to say how precise these are no i think so i think this is an interesting point around the you know very rigorous largely you know a lot of the work that's been done today it has been you know very strongly academic with the particularly all of what you and your team have supported and then i think and then we have a lot of the utility work which perhaps is focused on leak detection repair and optical gas imaging and i think understanding how each of these can fit can contribute to the puzzle that we need to solve on methane is really important so thank you and thanks Anders and with that it's a good time to head across to our our leading climate smart utility on the call here pair henrik if you would mind introducing if you would mind to introduce yourself and look forward to hearing your case study thank you amanda and i'm very happy to be here and presenting our work on our methane journey in bcs then mark my name is pure henrik nelson i'm i work for the utility and my responsibility in utility is to to do a lot of the development work and to oversee the development project and i've been so lucky to work together with both shallota and anders for provide some time and i'll get back to that so just a few words on bcs we're in a utility in the middle of then mark established way back in time and we are the third largest city in then mark we are supplying drinking water and wastewater services to our customers and we have worked very vigorously on being energy neutral and we have been energy neutral since 2019 and at the same time we are committed to innovation so we are not scared of diving deep into new projects and and off streets and so i i have a lot of work to do there on innovation just to set the scene we have eight wastewater treatment plants by far the biggest is ip mille at the the the southern part of our service area and we have a number of small wastewater treatment plants scattered over a bigger area there are a few figures here on on our service system system this is a picture of the ip mille wastewater treatment plant it's an old plant established in 1907 and we've been rebuilding it ever since so it's scattered all over the place and we have all kinds of gadgets and and treatment processes we have quite stringent stringent the discharge limit so we're sitting around a total nitrogen of four and point three in phosphorus mid-gram polluters so so we are having a good time in trying to to clean the water as well as possible and at the same time make good use of the biogas we produce in our digestive system as i said we have worked very a lot on on becoming energy neutral and this is a chart indicating that we as a utility right now are energy self-sufficient we are producing more electricity and heat we can sell the heat to district heating in Denmark which is very important and we are we are selling more energy than what we are producing so for us it's it has been a long battle or interesting fights to to become energy neutral and we have shown that it is possible for a decent sized utility to to really work hard on energy balance and produce a substantial amount of both electricity and heat that can be sold to the next but what is what is the future and what does the future hold for us the energy mix in Denmark has been decarbonized quite a bit so we're looking into new challenges for our system because earlier on the best way of producing co2 emissions were to to produce new new green energy but due to the fact that Denmark are producing a lot of the green energy in the grid we do not have the same footprint anymore from from our our energy production our energy consumption in in our utility meaning that that it gets more and more important for us to reduce our emissions that being me saying of course and the nitrogen oxide being the biggest problems that we are seeing in the future and that we have already now because the footprint of our energy consumption is quite low and and therefore emissions are the biggest problem that we are facing now whilst we have this energy self-sufficient in in our system we've been working on on trying to describe our our footprints in our std reporting we've been reporting having a std reporting for quite some years and and looking into greenhouse gas protocol we are struggling a little bit in different scopes the scope one and two are the normal scopes that you are you're reporting on and they are rather limited the footprints that we are looking at right now compared to scope three which we are battling right now and to to see if we can reduce our scope three emission and an outside scope is a is a another problem biogas biogenically co2 and and and co2 from from green or from combustion engine now our gas engine that we are producing energy from is a co2 footprint but it's outside scope and and that means that we we need to address that as as well as the problem so for us emissions has become more and more important in our in our work on trying to become more sustainable in in our work at the same time we are very it's very important for us not to get carbon tonalization a lot of work has been done on carbon emission and looking only at carbon emission for us it's important to to look broad and and being able to look at at different other impact factors unification is one that we have something to do with biodiversity as well and air pollution so for us we we are looking into a situation where we are making sure that we don't get carbon tonal vision but have a keen eye on on the on the problems related to to emissions as such we've heard a lot about measuring and problems with with methane and but but nobody are doing something about it shallota and are measuring and thomas are finding out how to regulate it but at the end of the day we are the one that needs to do something about the wastewater treatment people can do something about it so we we had this this project we are finalizing this project right now where where the aim is to reduce emissions from wastewater treatment methane and nitrous oxide are the main problems and it's a cooperation between utilities universities consultants and it's partly funded by the Danish EPA so they are they are so nice to give us some money to to help us conduct these projects the project includes a new advanced sludge handling advanced measurement at the treatment plants that's what Anders and shallota are doing advanced measurements in sewer system we have this question do we have do we have a problem in our sewer system do we actually account for the for the methane production in the sewer system and i i think that we have we can conclude now that it's a minor problem compared to to the wastewater treatment we did expect that somehow but it is nice to know and Anders has been very eagerly measuring in the sewer system as well and trying to understand where we have the hot spots we have had some pilot testing on the nitrous oxide the enhanced control strategy for minimizing that and looking at new online measurements we have in vcs participated in the in the liquid phase online measurement of nitrous oxide since 2010 and we now think that it's there's a need to to widen out our approach on that as well so what did we do about it we uh we decided that our old sludge storage here was was not very good because it really emitted a lot of the of the methane honors could prove that and so that was not a big surprise to us so it is like having a petrol tank where you where your petrol is running out so why not why not try to to close it and therefore we close the tank and build a new one with a lid on and making sure that the pressure relief well is the good one so we don't lose any any any unwanted release to to the atmosphere another thing we did was to look at the dissolved the methane in the sludge and that is a problem because in the sludge when it comes out of the digestion system there's a rather large amount of relatively big amount of methane dissolved in the in the fluid and we have the we have the looked at different technologies but settled on a system where we are running it through a a vacuum system so we actually release the the the methane from from the sludge screen including addition of magnesium because the spruvite precipitation would be a problem if we didn't control that at the same time so what did we do about it yeah we planned we we bought a plant from iliq ilovac p it's called and install that it I still believe that it's the biggest installation that they have done and and we are busy trying to get it to operate stable right now but it's it's it's been good to us and one added effect on that is that we get better sludge dewatering when we get the the methane out and that's really a a big benefit for for for the operation it's not a huge amount of of biogas we get out of the system compared to to the to the flow it's a few percent two or three percent of the of the total biogas that we are extracting from the from the sludge but it's it's still it it's a mission that's prevented and therefore we we see that as a as a necessary and good upgrade of the system finding the emissions it's really a a big problem despite the fact that anas and a lot have shown very good methods methods to it because there are these these big variations and and therefore we have done a lot of campaigns and now we have where we have solved the problem with the sludge storage facility and the sludge from the digest that we're looking in different other directions the primary clarification is certainly a problem that we need to address and we do see a problem there so i i think that's next on our hit list for for doing something on on these things but there will always be a biggest emission from one spot on the treatment plan so so finding the emissions is it's really important and having good methods to to to help solve that problem is it's really important conclusion on the iris project it is possible to for utilities to minimize the emissions it takes a bit of effort but but it is it is not impossible and with with some regulation and good initiatives and cooperation with universities it is possible to to to find methods to to minimize it and and it is really just making sure that you don't lose your petrol from your petrol tank minimizing a well-known source of the methane emissions we knew already that that the sludge storage facility was a big problem and to solve the methane was a big problem and we have clearly shown that it's possible to to eliminate that problem try to find other emission sources we do find emissions everywhere treatment plan and during warm summer it's different than cold winters and we have a number of problems we are addressing those and as long as we take them one by one i'm sure that we will be able to to to optimize our system and minimize our emissions we tested control strategies to to get a lower emission from the operation and we've been working on on the nitrous oxide as well on this project and we are evaluating the validity of the IPCC reporting from from Denmark based on the findings that that we have from this project it's a great team we have the all the biggest utilities in Denmark working on it and the leading consultant and the best universities so what can go wrong and it has been and is a really good project and good cooperation i think i'll conclude and leave to leave over to Amanda to to leave the discussion thanks for Henry a really interesting presentation and i think we've done very very good at answering lots of questions in the Q&A as well so thank you thank you team um so maybe just one one i wanted to ask you per Henry can then maybe we can ask all of everyone to come on camera and we have a wider discussion but um we we've discussed Thomas presented the um you know the the the regulations which don't require facility level quantification or even process unit quantification but you've mentioned obviously your your next one of your next tasks for methane might be primary settlement tanks um what as a you know as a utility who's leading in this space of process emissions what is it does this look like a series of projects that you do or are you doing a regular obviously there's the one-off quantification studies that have have been part of these fantastic academic collaborations but what are your sort of day-to-day or you know week-to-week year-to-year commitments or what what do you see for yourself as a utility having to do to um satisfy regulatory requirements but also to achieve what your objectives are which you know which no one is forcing you to do right now but i think you're doing it because it's the right thing to do yeah basically that's that's correct Amanda we're doing it because it's right things to do we have a strategy saying that we want to to to be sustainable in our operation and therefore we can justify taking the responsibility of doing something with problems that we see in our operation we take them that's of course a limit to our investment the capacity and how how fast we can we can rectify these problems but but we are eager to pursue that and and we regularly check our system whether we have leaks as we are supposed to and we've done that earlier on as well and and close some of the leaks that we have found so now it's getting into something that's more difficult covering primary tanks that are not meant for being covered it's a practical problem but we might be able to operate them differently depending on on the year on the time of the year and the temperature and stuff like that and reduce some emissions we have actually trickling filters at our wastewater treatment plant which is a very old technology we have that due to the fact that we we need to reduce ammonia pressure on the receiving water body during rain we have combined sewers so we have trickling filters we expect that we have a problem there in relation to to nitrous oxide could have we need to to quantify that so we have a number of projects still at hand the deamonification animal process that is burping a substantial amount of nitrous oxide needs to be stopped in that so we're looking at catalytical processes so so there's a number of projects that that still are in development that under consideration so so we have I will be busy quite some years to come thanks for Henrik and we'll obviously hear more about nitrous oxide also at our next webinar which Anna Katrin and Jakob will be hosting which will be really interesting also and around the cost effectiveness per Henrik final one the I mean I think on going back to nitrous oxide I think there's a little bit of a utilities want to see for example attacks on or they want to see incentives that then allow the funding mechanisms to address the monitoring requirement and the mitigation cost what about for methane because obviously the cost of covering tanks the you know let you mention the inadequate infrastructure how how do you see this being funded there's obviously a lot of it seems more more progressive regulators there because the energy agency and the EPA are potentially involved but how do you see this challenge around the cost to intervene and mitigate methane yeah it's it's a lousy business case as it is right now I mean the methane that we we we extract from from the vacuum system and from from the the covered the sludge storage facility will never will not pay for for the for for for for the installation so we are we we're not necessarily hoping for for most winning the regulation but incentives would be nice so so if we are best in class or we do something that we are at least it's it's financially justified that we are doing it and we see that as a as a little bit of a problem with the Danish regulation the Danish financial regulation of the utilities which is not very favorable for for for doing the right thing for the world but more for for the finances so so there are some dilemmas we are still battling there but but I think that in many cases something like these breather valves that the Anders was talking about can be justified in normal operation or relatively easy to be justified going to the extent with a vacuum extraction system and a fully covered tank it's difficult to justify in some cases unfortunately thanks for Henry should we um yeah just maybe open up into a I don't know if William if you stop sharing we can let others come on the screen for a bit just to to perhaps if anyone wants to I wanted to actually ask all of the panelists if possible and I think for Henry's probably answered a bit already but um what we've learned a lot about the Danish program and the work that's taken place and I guess um what are some of the remaining or what have been the reasons why it's been successful or if areas haven't been successful what are the challenges left and what do we you know what we mentioned some of the gaps but why has it it seems to be much more progress than we see in other countries and other sectors and it was across sectors it's not just water it's also the wider biogas sector so I just wondered maybe Thomas if you don't mind to start um what do you see as some of the the reasons for the success if you feel it's a success from an outsider's perspective it very much looks looks successful compared with what we see in in other areas although you know everyone's catching up hopefully I don't know if it was a success it was more like a surprise when we got this report from Jellard that it was not we was not running very well so I think Peer is a very fine example of the Danish water treatment plans because we want to do it right we want to do it better we want to do it in the right way if we can so I think it's in our system that we want to do it in a good way so I can't see it why we're doing better than our ones but we had this focus 10 years ago and now it's paying time by new regulation but I think it's the regulation is good it put focus on the problems thanks anyone else want to come in or um yes I would like to also comment on this on the same question I think one thing you can say is that we don't really know if it's successful yet um I think we need to quantify the effect of this regulation and as Jellard briefly mentioned that that will take take place in a in some time and then hopefully you will see a decrease in emission factor showing if the regulation has worked or not that is not to stop anyone else from doing anything it's just a but we don't really have proof on the effectiveness yet except for for maybe the figure that I showed that it is possible for if you go and monitor these these plans and they uh the the operators and the owners of the plan can can see for themselves where their emissions occur then we have found that it is possible for them to measurably reduce their emissions so so that is a positive sign I would say thanks and so maybe I can comment a bit also so if I now keep a positive perspective here I think one of the reasons is also that the Danish government and that's actually across most of the parties political parties that they agreed on and that we should have a very ambitious climate act and set very ambitious reduction targets so I think Denmark if we were not the first at least one of the first countries to say okay we aim for 70 reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and climate neutral by 2050 nowadays and this happened in the end I think they signed the act in the end of 2019 so it was probably discussed in the year up to that date and so so today there are many more countries that have similar targets and so that's very good and but I think I mean when you do this you also need to follow up and I'm not saying the things are going well in Denmark but but we are at this I mean 2030 that's just a few years from now right when we talk about implementing new technologies and so on so so there are a lot of actions being taken across different sectors so we have had actions in the waste sector and in the water sector they are reporting in the same sector actually but also now in agriculture and it's it's not it's not easy and the reason why it's not easy because I think we have a very good reporting system with the IPCC they give guidelines on how to account the emissions and so on and so that's very good because it's a transparent system so we can compare across countries but we don't actually know how well the true emissions they or how close the true emissions are to these you can say calculated or accounted emissions and now the government the Danish government they take political actions and also they're discussing this should we have a climate tax for anything not on on these also on these um yeah you can say none CO2 gases and so on and then of course it becomes quite important that you are actually that you actually know the true emissions and not some arbitrary calculated estimated emissions because now it suddenly affects companies economy and also the budget that is allocated to reduce emissions if there are some national support so so yeah so I don't know I think there's there is this at least there is this realization that you know there are not that many years to 2030 so action needs to be taken and we actually all do not always know our baseline emissions thanks a lot and I think you know the IPCC um well for for methane you know for methane from wastewater treatment you know there's a there's a factor there I think methane from sludge management is sort of a between zero and ten percent and we pick a number between that so I think the but then obviously that's at tier one and then you know the recommendation the guideline is we need tier three we need facility level monitoring but I think the you know there's no obligation on countries that's you know up to them within the means of the country to support that facility level monitoring and then even when we have the facility level monitoring how that perhaps informs improved emission factors so that at a at a country level in that waste sector we can actually show tangible reduction I think there's a lot of still yet to be answered questions and I guess we rely a lot on the progressive utilities and you know the momentum from as you say across a cross partisan across political parties as well to drive progress because it's not clear that it will it is not clear how it you know how it comes without that motivation from from yeah from the utilities plus the regulators and we are certainly not seeing this in every country at all so any anyone else want to share any other thoughts or hopes I can well people are thinking I can share another thought so I mean I think I personally have waited quite a long time for regulation so government has to make decisions and take actions but there is also a new tendency and that's actually that the customers that they start to require that that when they for example so for example the Copenhagen municipality when they have to make a decisions on where should they put the source separated organic household waste where should that be sent for treatment at a biogas plant and they would require that the biogas plant can actually show that they have control on their methane emissions it could be the same I know I had a meeting some time ago with the mass shipping and they also start to say okay we're not going to buy biomethane from a biogas plant where they cannot show that they have control on their methane losses so I mean it's a little bit of a new tendency I think and we know it also just from the general public that they start to ask just to require that there is a certain level of information on these things available for them to make decisions based on these on this oh yeah yeah and they you know they're someone scope one emissions or someone else's scope three emissions so if we start to do proper accounting and I guess we we also want to come to this in the fourth webinar in the series and we know it's all interconnected and having having good guidance and robust accounting is yeah so important thank you with that maybe we I think we've done really well on the questions and I think maybe we'll go back to the slides William and just we've got a few just of a few notes but I just wanted to say huge thank you to to all the presenters really fantastic and there's lots of links and I really would recommend reading the all machine translating but there's a lot of excellent papers in English obviously published in peer review journals journals particularly from the work of Charlotte and Anders that very very useful looking across the whole biogas chain as well but next on the fourth of September we've got the monitoring mitigating nitrous oxide so again learning from some of the the Danish experience there and then our fourth and final webinar on the third of October will be brought by our Iowa greenhouse gas working group and and really broadening the conversation to wider emissions as well and then just a short note on two upcoming webinars there which both look extremely interesting and you can sign up you can also become a member of Iowa and we also have a greenhouse gas within the climate smart utilities group we do have a small working group we're currently producing a white paper on nitrous oxide monitoring and we want to do one on methane as well and of course we'll draw on some of the expertise in in the webinar here to hopefully help help us review that but and the idea would be to to provide some nice utility information which which currently is is lacking so if you would like to hear more about that please feel free to get in touch with with Iowa and to check out the the climate smart utilities page as well and if you join you get a discount and with that I think we want to say thank you very much for participating it was great to have I think at one point we have a hundred people and we had many more sign up who listened to it on the recording from all over the world which was fantastic so please share this share this share this with your friends friends and colleagues and if you yeah please sign up for our next one on methane and very very nice to have you and a huge thank you again to the Iowa team and also to our panelists today thanks everyone