Onboard Dynamics Blog

Onboard Dynamics has been named as a finalist for the Best Advance in Maintenance Technology Award by the Pipeline & Gas Journal. The awards will be held November 17^th, 2022.

The product that has secured the nomination was the GoVAC FLEX. It enables pipeline crews to virtually eliminate methane emissions from pipeline evacuations. With the GoVAC FLEX, operators can draw down the pipeline to near 0 PSIG. The recovered natural gas can then be transferred either into an adjoining pipeline or compressed up to 3600 PSIG and put into a tube trailer for transport and reinjection elsewhere or put into a storage tank to be used as CNG fuel for vehicles.

The patented, integrated combustion-compression system is powered by a small portion of the natural gas that would otherwise be wasted. Without the need for external power sources, such as diesel-powered air compressors, this design results in the lowest possible carbon and emissions footprint during pipeline evacuations.

This self-contained system is small enough to be towed by a standard pickup, which makes it easy to maneuver around job sites and be quickly deployed in field operations.

State-of-the-art telemetry and controls including temperature and pressure sensors, electronic valves, and flow meters are installed throughout the system to enable ease of operation, to facilitate remote monitoring capabilities and to provide data collection for reporting purposes.

Lastly, the system is designed with attention to low noise for use in neighborhoods or high-density spaces.

The system enables the natural gas industry to take aggressive steps in eliminating methane leaks and intentional releases that occur today. Doing this ensures that natural gas plays a critical role during our path to a net-zero energy future.

About the Pipeline & Gas Journal Awards

The Awards recognize and celebrate the innovators and innovations that drive the midstream industry forward.  

The ceremony takes place on Thursday, Nov. 17 in the lovely Monarch Ballroom of the Westin Galleria Hotel in Houston, Texas. 

The Northeast Gas Association (NGA) has teamed up with Onboard Dynamics to provide a demonstration and training opportunity called the Virtual Product and Service Solution Spotlight to keep their members connected with important gas industry products and services. This virtual event is offered at no cost for NGA members to attend.

The Product Spotlights offer information about new tools, technologies, and services that can enhance operations. Attendees can chat live with other gas industry professionals, manufacturers, distributors, and service providers.

This spotlight topic will be about the GoVAC FLEX – Pipeline Evacuation System. The presentation will be held Tuesday, September 20, 2022 from 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM EST. Titled: Capture and Recover Natural Gas from Pipelines During Blowdowns with the GoVAC FLEX will be Presented by: Rick Kay, COO of Onboard Dynamics LLC.

The GoVAC FLEX is a revolutionary tool for minimizing methane releases during pipeline blowdowns. It is a complete self-contained pipeline evacuation system that can transfer recovered natural gas to either an adjacent pipeline or compress the gas to 3600 PSI for use elsewhere as a CNG fuel. It is powered by a small portion of the natural gas being recovered, so no external power is required. Its compact size facilitates transport and positioning at job sites. Remote monitoring ensures reliable operation and responsive service. State-of-the-art telemetry provides accurate and detailed environmental reporting. The GoVAC FLEX is part of a growing family of sustainability products from Onboard Dynamics to support the natural gas ecosystem. 

During this session, members will learn how the GoVAC FLEX enables operators to take the lead in incorporating best practices of capture and recovery of natural gas during pipeline evacuations while also offering these benefits: 

• Easy to operate.
• Easy to set up and deploy.
• Safe and compliant.
• Fully automated.
• Fast and efficient from beginning to end.

Benefits such as these will help the natural gas industry keep the natural gas pipeline infrastructure well maintained while mitigating methane emissions.

The goal of Onboard Dynamics is to support the natural gas ecosystem in reducing global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions safely and reliably through our innovative and practical commercial solutions. Our patented, compression-based systems minimize methane and other GHG releases during pipeline operations and maintenance, mitigate GHG emissions from transportation vehicles, and capture methane that would otherwise be released to the atmosphere from other industrial operations. Our customers receive expanded environmental benefits and reduction in costs through purchasing, leasing, and/or receiving turn-key services from our natural gas-powered products.

Guest Blog Post Excerpt: Read the full blog post at the NWGA website here>>

For our society to prosper and thrive while also meeting our environmental goals, there needs to be reframing and rethinking of how we talk about our natural gas ecosystem. We need to help the public better understand the many benefits of natural gas and its supporting infrastructure while living with the risks from all forms of energy and associated infrastructure. So how can natural gas play an important role in achieving our net-zero energy system?  A key step in achieving this goal is to ensure that no natural gas is released into the atmosphere during natural gas pipeline evacuation associated with routine maintenance and unexpected repairs.

Rita Hansen, CEO of Onboard Dynamics will be presenting solutions for methane recovery at the 2022 Western Regional Gas Conference. The session will be held at 10:15 am on August 24th. During this session, attendees will learn how the GoVAC^® FLEX enables operators to take the lead in incorporating best practices during natural gas pipeline evacuation.

There are a handful of technologies across the performance spectrum available to operators to assist in performing pipeline evacuation. Onboard Dynamics has launched one of them. It is called the GoVAC FLEX, which enables pipeline crews to prevent close to 100% of emissions from happening. With the GoVAC Flex, operators can draw down the pipeline to near 0 PSIG using the natural gas in the pipeline as its source of power. The recovered gas can then be transferred into an adjoining pipeline or compressed up to 3600 PSIG and put into a tube trailer for transport and reinjection elsewhere or into a storage tank to be used as CNG fuel for vehicles.

The GoVAC Flex is a mobile system that has a flow rate of 100 SCFM or 100MCF per day. The system can accept inlet pressures up to 1200 PSI and outlet pressures are based on what you are compressing into with a maximum of 3600 PSI.

The Western Regional Gas Conference is held in Scottsdale, Arizona on August 23 and 24th. It is a non-profit organization that covers O&M topics, integrity management, and new technology for the natural gas industry. There are conferences, seminars, and vendor exhibits.

The WRGC objectives are to provide a venue for discussion of natural gas distribution and transmission topics, regulations, and issues. It provides an atmosphere of fellowship, information exchange, and networking between delegates, speakers, and vendors. The venue also gives operators a chance to interact with PHMSA and State Regulators on an informal basis.

Those of us involved in the US energy ecosystem find that our days are filled with a never-ending stream of new challenges such as increasing energy costs, supply chain issues, more stringent environmental regulations, narrowing reserve margins, increasing interest rates, and so forth. Can you imagine what is like to be in the corresponding energy ecosystem in Europe, where all these same forces are in play …. plus, there is a war going on next door, with threats of eminent curtailment in nearly 30% of your energy supply? Such is the situation faced today by nations of the European Union (EU).

While an ocean might physically separate the US from the EU, this same ocean will not isolate us from what is happening in the European energy world. In this article, we’ll look at actions that the EU has immediately taken to update its energy strategy in response to the war. Then we’ll discuss how these actions might affect the US and lessons that we might learn to enhance our own strategies as we move forward in this new world.  

Those who are not familiar with the process of creating and implementing energy policy within the EU will be surprised at the formal, comprehensive, bureaucratic, and centralized process they follow. In contrast, here in the US, it seems that our energy policy can be pivoted frequently by a wide variety of relatively isolated single events or actions, such as executive orders, court rulings, or the actions of a single Senator. The EU energy policy is largely driven by a series of constantly evolving policy statements, plans, and regulations that bind all EU members to a variety of actions.

Before Russia initiated the war in Ukraine, the most recent, comprehensive EU energy directive was the “Fit for 55” plan presented July 14, 2021. The focus of this plan was to describe policies and actions that the EU would take to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to 55% of their 1990 levels by 2030, on a path to be “climate neutral” by 2050. Again, it can be hard for us in the US to envision how detailed and comprehensive these EU plans can be, but in the illustration below, each cell represents highly detailed plans for component pieces of the energy puzzle providing a clear picture of the detailed content of the Fit for 55 plan.

As recent and comprehensive as the Fit for 55 plan was, it did not anticipate the impacts on energy of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. For example, an important tool used in the plan to achieve near term GHG reductions was to use natural gas to replace coal for electricity generation. Before the war, about 40% of natural gas used in the EU came from Russia, so almost overnight, this key element of the plan was invalid.

In a matter of weeks following the invasion of Ukraine, the EU released on May 18 a revision of Fit for 55, REPowerEU, whose goal is “to rapidly reduce dependence on Russian fossil fuels and fast forward the green transition”. Just like Fit for 55, the REPowerEU impacts virtually every element of the energy ecosystem: natural gas, biomethane, wind, solar, hydrogen, infrastructure (both electric and gaseous), electric vehicles, synthetic fuels, conservation, international trade, work force training, emissions trading, finance, critical materials, etc. To achieve its more aggressive goals, REPowerEU calls for the EU to spend an additional 210 billion euro (~$225 billion at today’s exchange rate) between now and 2027. This updated plan has 4 main themes:

• Re-double energy conservation measures (especially buildings);
• Diversify energy supplies (e.g., more LNG from US and other secure sources);
• Accelerate clean energy transition (e.g, increase renewables from 40% in 2030 to 45%, largely via more offshore wind and hydrogen);
• Guide investments and regulatory reforms (e.g., streamline permitting)

To this analyst, one of the most interesting things we in the US can learn from REPowerEU is to better understand “What does it look like to transition a wealthy, industrialized population of hundreds of millions away from ‘fossil gas’”. The EU is trying to make this transition in a few years. Some in the US say we should do this within the next few decades. Can we in the US watch and learn from the EU, relying on our abundant domestic supply of natural gas to provide us a clean, lower cost transition period?

An important, near-term priority of the REPowerEU plan, and shared by many in the US gas industry, is a very aggressive stance toward renewable natural gas (RNG) from bio sources (animal wastes, landfills, and water treatment plants). Increasing RNG production is especially appealing in the EU since it directly replaces Russian gas as a “drop in” replacement.

In studying either the Fit for 55 or the most recent REPowerEU plan, the element that I believe would stand out to most readers is the important, essential role of hydrogen in the EU’s future energy system. The analysts and planners in the EU seem to understand that moving and storing massive volumes of energy in gaseous form has advantages that cannot be matched by electricity (and batteries) alone. The following chart shows that the EU planners expect that use of hydrogen (along with associated synthetic methane, aka e-gas) will surpass fossil gas by the early 2040’s.

Furthermore, both recent EU plans call for ADDITIONAL gas pipelines to move gaseous fuels both within the EU and from marine import terminals. These terminals would initially import fossil gas from US and the Middle East transitioning to green hydrogen from solar-rich regions (e.g., Africa, Spain). The EU energy planners understand that carbon-free, gaseous fuels have advantages over electricity due to costs of transportation and long-duration storage. Far from viewing new pipelines as a way to “lock in” use of fossil gas, the EU takes a longer view and recognizes that pipelines are an excellent way to carry renewable energy. A map of one such plan, including its new pipelines and connections to North Africa and the Middle East, is shown below:

It should be noted that this scenario of upgrading gaseous pipelines to be compatible with, and ultimately carrying, either methane or green hydrogen has also been proposed by SoCal Gas for its service territory. In addition, a Houston-based consortium has proposed a similar green hydrogen ecosystem for southeast Texas, the H2Houston Hub, that would be based on expanding existing hydrogen production, transportation, underground storage, and chemical engineering expertise. 

As interesting as what the EU plans say explicitly is what they do not say but hold open for future options. A prime example of this is the role of nuclear power. Just as in the US, nuclear power is a somewhat of a 3^rd rail in that some feel it is essential while others view it as deadly. The most recent REPowerEU seems to hedge this issue. Nuclear power could play a complementary role with hydrogen as its 24/7 availability would lower its cost by operating electrolyzers continuously instead of only when the sun was shining or wind blowing. Furthermore, low-cost hydrogen is key to the production of green synthetic fuels, including e-methane (for existing pipelines) and synthetic aviation fuels. It is interesting to note that, again motivated by the war in Ukraine and the associated desire to become more energy secure, Japan is moving to re-open its nuclear power plants.

There is much for us to learn, both as an industry and as a nation, as the EU moves to free itself from Russian gas. Those who are agile will find opportunities with both environmental and business benefits. The US can learn a lot from the EU about how to navigate the future energy challenges we’ll be facing as a nation. 

Jeff Witwer, PHD, PE

Jeff is the Technical Advisor/Co-founder of Onboard Dynamics. He is an experienced entrepreneur, having founded or co-founded two companies in the energy and software industries before co-founding Onboard Dynamics.