Emissions reduction and methane abatement became intriguing new opportunities for Laura Kennedy, co-owner and CEO of off-grid generator manufacturer Global Power Technologies (GPT), when she and partner and CFO Collin Newman bought the company in 2019.

“Since 2019, a lot of our new product development focus is specifically on the power required to drive the energy transition, emissions efficiency and methane reduction systems. It was a real shift in the company,” Kennedy said in an interview with DOB Energy.

The company’s thermal electric generators, or TEGs, had been used and sold by GPT as a unique technology for decades. People like them, Kennedy said, because as machinery with virtually no moving parts they are “extremely high reliability, with almost no maintenance required.”

“What we're now seeing as a huge trend is for companies to use [TEGs] in a solar hybrid application, so that means I have solar panels, batteries, and a charge controller, but basically what you're doing is you're decreasing the emissions from the TEG, and you're adding reliability to the solar and the battery,” she said.

GPT transferred this operational tech to their emission reductions machinery — high-powered MX Primegen Power Generators, and EZ Air Instrument Air methane emissions reduction systems.

“By far the fastest-growing segment of our company is our clean air or let's call it our methane reduction solutions, and our high efficiency generators, the MX,” Kennedy said.

“I see that trend continuing in part because companies need more power, so the MX is a better power fit and they need to meet the environmental requirements, which the MX can do, and the EZ Air allows us to do as well.”

The MX runs on natural gas or propane and provides up 6kW which can serve methane reduction equipment or solutions that require more power.

“In the past, a site could run with very little electrical power, but to drive emissions reduction equipment now you often need more. That's one of the reasons we created the MX — people can buy the MX alone or they could buy what's called an instrument air system,” Kennedy said. 

“It's a common solution, it's seen as one of the most economic opportunities for major methane reduction in oil and gas, and the objective is to stop venting from pneumatic devices.”

One example Kennedy gave is in terms of how the natural gas pressure in the wellhead can operate valves at a certain pressure, so electricity is not needed other than for some small monitoring or communications.

“When you use Instrument Air, what you need to do is compress the air so that it's pressurized and then you run it down to those pneumatic instruments, and the difference is that every time the pneumatic valve actuates it opens and puffs air, now you're letting out with clean air instead of letting out gas,” she said.

The coming shift in Canadian methane abatement

Kennedy believes that the growing commitment to methane abatement in Canada will shift further into gear later this year as the debate continues following last December’s COP 28 meetings.

“One of the big drivers we believe for Alberta is to focus on the economic feasibility of the regulations and not just the technical feasibility of the regulation,” Kennedy said.

“The regulations are saying it's possible to meet a certain methane target and that's where they're talking about the 75 per cent reduction in methane by 2030, but if it's not economic how do you continue to make natural gas affordable?”

“There have been examples of where regions have really tried to go very green and you end up seeing consumers, your overall population, getting to a point where heat is not affordable, energy is not affordable… so there needs to be economic solutions as well as technically feasible solutions and those are improving every year, right, but there's no big snap your fingers and we're going to get there.

“General reduction of pneumatic venting is certainly the low hanging fruit and I believe Canada is doing quite well in moving forward with solutions towards eliminating pneumatic venting, but there's a number of technical challenges that are really hard to solve and account for.”

Kennedy said it will be difficult to meet some of the targets that have been set out by the federal proposals, but a lot of small companies are working hard to try to solve those challenges.

“We’re one of those companies where we're always trying to come up with ideas, but it’s finding an economic return on the methane that you've abated to say, ‘yeah, that's a good idea. That's what we're looking for in the cost per methane abated.’

“Is it competitive with, for example, pneumatic venting solutions that are available on the market today?”

“I think it's an exciting time to be in the industry… hype is probably the wrong word, it has too much negative emotion to it… but there's a lot of excitement is a better way to say that everybody wants to do better.”

Kennedy sees the desire by industry to meet the targets that Canada or the U.S. are setting, but says the challenges are sometimes very large.

“It's not just excuses to say, ‘oh that's too hard.’ It is challenging to meet some of those targets,” she said.

“The innovative community of entrepreneurship, with government funding as a huge support to companies like ours for coming up with those innovations, and then an industry who's willing to partner with innovative companies — those are all parts of what I think are going to drive that forward.”

Provinces and feds need to set plans soon

Kennedy says regulation agreements between the federal and provincial governments will guide industry and need to be done sooner rather than later for clarity’s sake.

“[They] need to determine how we all do that dance together. And in the United States, there is a similar position,” she said.

“Some states, for example Colorado, already have some of those mandates in practice and other states haven't yet defined them, but what we're seeing again is that dichotomy of if a company has strong ESG values and statements in place, they are already taking action, they’re the first movers.”

Companies on both sides of the border are waiting until regulations, fines and the taxes come in to get a better understanding of the requirements, priorities and timing, Kennedy said. And many are waiting for this before they take any action.

“I think the fear is, if you spend to abate methane in the wrong category, I'm going to call it, then maybe when the regulations come in, you'll be required to spend in a different category and now your budget is gone. So, I think there's a wait-and-see that's happening. I would say that's more in the United States, we're seeing that by state,” Kennedy said.

“In Canada, I think there's already a fair amount of activity happening, but that will change as clarity around the new regulations evolve. I think later this year and into next year we’ll see for both Canada and the U.S. more clarity and more drive to making decisions.”

Kennedy says one interesting and important thing from a supplier standpoint is that a lot of these regulations are targeting an improvement by 2030.

“If nobody acts or decides until 2030, you can either say we're going to have a hell of a year in 2029, or it can't be done,” she said.

“The longer that we wait to make these regulations, and if there's not enough carrot or incentive for first movers to act early, it's going to be almost impossible for suppliers like ourselves to move on a slow simmer and expect to fill this massive demand of required implementations in one or two years.

“That would create an almost impossible supply chain to deliver on, and that's where we're trying to get the word out early, and trying to support trials, first movers, improvement of our equipment, the economic feasibility of our equipment, as early as we can, so that we can support that full range of energy transition purchasing that we think will need to happen.”

Editor’s note: In a separate article, Kennedy discusses her history and what brought her purchase GPT, as well as her observations on the Canadian energy industry’s shift to low carbon. Access that article here.