Calgary’s Kathairos has scrubbed the equivalent of one million tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere, the company announced on Monday. It’s a milestone that the cleantech company says validates its technology’s scalability.Â
The news: Kathairos replaces methane-rich natural gas with liquid nitrogen at oil and gas sites that use pressured gas to power and control valves and regulate pressure. That gas is regularly vented, releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. By replacing that methane with nitrogen—an inert, climate-neutral gas— the company says it has reduced emissions equivalent to one million tonnes of carbon dioxide.
From the source: One million tonnes is the equivalent of removing 233,255 gas-powered passenger vehicles from the road for an entire year, or the energy usage of 134,297 homes, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency’s greenhouse gas equivalencies calculator. That’s a lot in terms of the average citizen’s carbon footprint, but less so against industrial emitters, where it’s roughly equivalent to removing 2.6 natural gas-fired power plants over the course of a year, or just 20 percent of one coal-fired power plant.
Following the thread: Kathairos now has more than 2,000 liquid nitrogen-powered systems deployed across North America, with nearly 70 oil and gas companies making the switch to nitrogen. That adoption, the company says, validates that their technology—which includes installing a cryogenic liquid nitrogen storage tank at a well site and then using the expanding liquid nitrogen to power the site’s pneumatic equipment—is both more environmentally friendly and industrially scalable.
Final thought: Kathairos founder and CEO Dick Brown has long believed the problem preventing the oil and gas industry from greening its remote venting technology was that there was not an economically viable, field-tested alternative. Methane is a significant contributor to the global climate crisis, with each tonne of methane emitted being worth roughly 30 tonnes of CO2, according to the US Energy Information Administration. With sustainability top of mind for many in the energy sector, Kathairos’s tech and others like it are more widely being seen as a viable way to tamp down emissions.
BetaKit’s Prairies reporting is funded in part by YEGAF, a not-for-profit dedicated to amplifying business stories in Alberta.
Feature image courtesy Kathairos.