Temporal variation and grade categorization of methane emission from LNG fueling stations

Abstract

Natural gas is increasingly seen as the fossil fuel of choice for China as it transitions to renewable sources. The significant development of China’s LNG vehicle application and fueling stations and the urgency of climate changes make it particularly important to quantify methane emission from LNG stations, where the data are extremely rare. We carried out a pilot study on direct measurement and quantitative analysis of methane emission from five LNG fueling stations located in Shandong, China following the standard stationary EPA OTM 33A method. The measured methane emission of these five stations vary from 0.01 to 8.76 kg/h. The loss rates vary from 0.004 to 0.257%. We demonstrated that the emission from LNG stations consist of continuous and intermittent contents. The intermittent emission shows a strong temporal variation. If a station is only monitored for 20 min, it may either under-estimate or over-estimate the total emission. Both the distribution of emission events and total emission rates among different stations are highly skewed. We found that these LNG fueling station emission can be categorized into 3 grades, as low, medium and high, corresponding to emission rates below 0.1 kg/h; between 0.1 and 1 kg/h and above 1 kg/h, which can be characterized by the measured average methane concentration enhancement.