With the oil and gas industry accounting for almost 70% of methane emissions in Alberta, the AER is focused on closely monitoring emissions from the industry. As a result, many oil and gas producers are now getting audited by the AER on its fugitive emissions Directive 060.
Many producers try to keep up with compliance inspections on paper and encounter errors – either data isn’t gathered correctly by all field team members or sites get missed. It’s also not uncommon for a busy field operator to forget to submit their Fugitive Emissions Survey report on time.
What’s the risk to your operations? If you land on the AER’s infraction list of Noncompliance & Enforcement, you face process interruptions, production delays and potentially slowing future production projects from being approved.
Oil and gas producers can’t afford the regulatory compliance risk of manual tracking on Excel sheets. Field operations teams need a foolproof and timely way to monitor and manage fugitive emissions from monitoring, through to inspections, leak detection and repairs, and reporting.
How can producers make fugitive emissions management efficient and lower compliance risk?
There are 4 critical aspects of efficient fugitive emissions management to get right:
- Consistent and accurate data monitoring
- Audit readiness
- Issue response readiness
- Timely reporting
With EZ Ops field operations software, teams are equipped to easily gather accurate data on fugitive emissions on a tablet as well as streamline cross-team communication to rapidly resolve active leaks and issues. Plus, management gets real-time visibility into total fugitive emissions as well as status on active leaks to drive accountability.
Here’s how it works:
- Third-party inspectors or operators fill out digital inspection forms in EZ Ops to report on fugitive emissions faster and more efficiently.
- Management assigns an operator or contractor to fix a leak or other emission task to ensure it gets closed out.
- Easily pull reports in real-time to get an overview of your fugitive emissions to date.
- Quickly calculate your emissions total to make on-the-spot adjustments to reduce emissions.
What’s the impact of using EZ Ops to manage fugitive emissions?
EZ Ops equips field teams to inspect and rapidly respond to compliance issues in less time – even if they are junior operators. With consistent accurate monitoring in the field that’s captured digitally, head office can prepare reports in minutes not hours. And during audits, EZ Ops users have certainty emissions monitoring was done right and have at hand an immediate data trail for enquiry response.
“The audit went really well today. The auditor was very impressed with the setup we have in EZ Ops. By having normal operating pressures and alarms when guys enter parameters outside of those, he was almost beside himself. He said lots of companies should be using EZ Ops.”
– Area Lead Foreman
There will always be moments when things go unexpectedly wrong. EZ Ops helps you detect and fix leaks fast for maximum impact on your fugitive emissions.
Gain certainty of compliance with EZ Ops
What do these impacts add up to? For one mid-size E&P company, replacing its paper-based compliance monitoring with EZ Ops operations software resulted in less office time for operators, more consistent monitoring, increased visibility and faster, accurate reports for regulators. See the full impact in the case study.
With a proven track record of simplifying compliance management for producers, EZ Ops’ customers see these benefits:
- Reduce compliance effort for foremen from 30% to 5% of monthly effort
- Proactively schedule hundreds of inspections per month
- Fix compliance incidents 20% faster, often same-day
- Cut reporting time from 4 days to 4 hours per month
EZ Ops works the industry’s most respected and responsible Canadian oil and gas producers from majors to midsize to help them efficiently master regulatory compliance, including monitoring fugitive emissions. With technology built by former field operators, field teams easily keep up with consistent and timely compliance monitoring so inspections and reporting goes smoothly. If you’d like a tour of EZ Ops, schedule a demo.