Facing a tight timeline and managing a project with a multifaceted stakeholder group, Delta Brick and Climate Company turned to Methane Signals to harness its empirical data and develop a baseline forecast for the potential to create highly differentiated carbon offset credits from the capture of fugitive methane emissions from an abandoned coal mine in Pitkin County, Colorado.
Delta Brick and Climate Company is committed to reimagining the energy and materials supply chain for high-quality custom consumer ceramics by repurposing waste products from the legacy coal mining and agricultural industries of Western Colorado.
In this endeavor, Delta Brick and Climate Company came across Coal Basin, an abandoned coal mining complex running through the 11,000-foot-tall mountains of the White River National Forest. Having already closed and undergone landscape restoration, enhanced atmospheric methane concentrations around the abandoned mine caught the attention of Delta Brick and Climate Company.
This began Delta Brick and Climate Company’s multi-year effort to scout and monitor suspected sources of methane emissions from the abandoned mining complex. Those efforts led to a partnership with a local nonprofit, The Community Officer for Resource Efficiency (CORE), and a grant award from the US Department of Energy to perform enhanced methane emissions monitoring and solutions scoping.
The grant funded aircraft flyovers, drone flights, and the installation of continuous monitoring ground sensors. Aircraft data estimated that there was approximately 2,000 tons of methane emitting from Coal Basin each year, but the rugged and remote setting of the abandoned mining complex made the reconciliation of those estimates and attribution to point sources through drone and ground sensor data extremely challenging and left too much uncertainty to gain community support for abatement measures.
Of the seven monitored locations, Delta Brick and Climate Company only had gathered complete data from a single location that resided outside of the targeted abandoned mining complex.
Facing the challenge of harmonizing, aggregating, and analyzing the incomplete data set, Delta Brick and Climate Company called on Methane Signals to make the data actionable. Methane Signals combined the available empirical data with its robust historical weather data set and employed machine learning to produce annual methane emissions estimates and quantify the opportunity to abate methane emissions at the Coal Basin complex.
With Methane Signals ability to provide hourly site level emissions estimates throughout the expansive Coal Basin complex and reconcile the variations in emissions observed over a year, the project received approval from both the community and the US Forest Services.
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