9 ms·

Google's mapping cars discover hundreds of underground gas leaks

245 points by state_machine 10y ago

state_machine 10y ago
More details on the program: https://www.edf.org/climate/methanemaps https://www.edf.org/climate/methanemaps and the other cities they've mapped: https://www.edf.org/climate/methanemaps/city-snapshots https://www.edf.org/climate/methanemaps/city-snapshots
- mturmon 10y ago
  Thanks for pointing this out. I understand that EDF was the driving force behind this initiative, but the fact that the sensors were mounted on Google cars seems to have diverted attention from that fact. There's a growing effort to monitor CO2, CH4, and CO at very fine spatial scales, and to do inverse modeling to infer emission rates ("fluxes") from the snapshots. (E.g., https://megacities.jpl.nasa.gov/portal/ https://megacities.jpl.nasa.gov/portal/)
andrenotgiant 10y ago
Another hint at what is to come when Google starts organizing the world's _offline_ information. Google Books and Google Streetview are just the tip of the iceberg. I would be willing to bet that "massively distributed real-time data collector" was listed as a key business case by whoever pitched self-driving cars at Google.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
Animats 10y ago
That's useful. The mapping cars could carry some other useful sensors. Air quality is obvious. Less obvious is RF leakage from cable TV cable, which can interfere with other spectrum users. Cable companies used to have to check this every two years, but they lobbied to not have to check it.
- LeoPanthera 10y ago
  I'm a Radio Ham, and the biggest source of RF noise is arcing power lines, and those powerline ethernet adapters some people use instead of wifi. Arcing power lines can be tracked down with with a shortwave radio and reported, but the powerline adapters are a nightmare. They're suppposed to notch out the amateur radio bands but many do not, often swamping everything from 3 to 30MHz with noise.
  - ChristianBundy 10y ago
    Is there a reason they don't mess with UHF? Studying for my ham exam as we speak.
    - LeoPanthera 10y ago
      UHF does not propagate through power lines, the frequency is too high.
    - srl295 10y ago
      Because they don't operate in the UHF bands' frequencies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadband_over_power_lines#Implementation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadband_over_power_lines#Imp... says "0-30MHZ" (that's the HF bands) "and sometimes as high as 80Mhz" (50Mhz would be 6-meters)
  - street 10y ago
    What about those adapters causes the issue? Is it the devices themselves emitting radiation? The cabling in a house?
    - upofadown 10y ago
      The cabling radiates like crazy at those frequencies. Interestingly enough, there is enough radiation that you don't really need an actual connection. Someone put one of the endpoints in a field with a generator and got a connection to another endpoint. In a sense power line adapters are just using radio over the air. Sending data over a power line, even at low bit rates is very difficult to do reliably. So all the radiation is in a sense a feature in that it improves connectivity. Not so much a feature to those who have an actual licence to use those frequencies...
danso 10y ago
Is the collected raw data available? Would be interesting to cross-reference what the Google cars found with 311 complaints. Here's NYC's 311 data: https://nycopendata.socrata.com/Social-Services/311-Service-Requests-from-2010-to-Present/erm2-nwe9 https://nycopendata.socrata.com/Social-Services/311-Service-... ...I recall there being a category for people calling in gas odor, but the Socrata site seems to be slow/down at the moment.
- dfc 10y ago
  It looks like NYC is not in scope: > Dallas is one of nine participating cities, including > Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago and Jacksonville. This program > was developed with scientists from Colorado State Univ
godgod 10y ago
Google collecting anything scares me.
alex_g 10y ago
Why are these sensors not placed on garbage trucks or police cars?
- danso 10y ago
  Bureaucracy, most likely. As a researcher, attaching sensors to public vehicles is an arrangement that you'd have to make separately with each jurisdiction. With Google, there is just one jurisdiction to negotiate with.
  - BHSPitMonkey 10y ago
    Waste collection services are often privatized. They probably don't need the city's permission to collect environmental sensor data.
- asdfologist 10y ago
  What did they say when you suggested this to your local sanitation and police workers?
- HeyLaughingBoy 10y ago
  So, you put the sensors on municipal vehicles. Then what? Who pays for the data upload and storage? Who pays for sensor maintenance? Who looks at it and interprets it? Who gets the benefit? From the POV of a local government official, I'll bet this looks like a way to throw money down a rat hole and be voted out for doing so.
  - beamatronic 10y ago
    A local municipality can just sell/lease the space on the vehicle. The city provides 12v power and sheet metal space for bolting on a box. In return they get monthly cash payments.
    - pbhjpbhj 10y ago
      Insurance companies that have GPS trackers / driving analysis boxes could add sensors and sell that data too.
retox 10y ago
And all they had to sacrifice was personal privacy!
- AckSyn 10y ago
  Like all great futuristic advances we've seen in the last two decades that REALLY put us into the "we're living in the future" category, there's a plus and negative side. I love that I can wear a watch that doubles as a phone, health monitor, gps/mapping, mp3 player, etc. The flip side of there being a loss of privacy would both be technological (weak or no security in the device itself or the apps and services it uses) and political (government saying "give me all the data"). This cry of "but my privacy!" is nothing more than a useless complaint, and does nothing to address the problem. We as citizens and consumers of such great tech NEED to demand better device security as well as political reform. Changes in how things are done and why. So be picky about which tech you buy and politicians you vote. Be picky with your time, money, votes. Don't, however, waste time on comments that do nothing to address the problem. That includes providing no information to further advance your ideology: privacy. No product endorsements to sway us into purchasing or supporting something which WILL keep your private info out of nosy third-party hands, or info about politicians or policy we should be aware of? That would be a pointless comment when you obviously care about something.
- clock_tower 10y ago
  I don't carry a smartphone, I don't have a Facebook account, and I use NoScript, so I have a certain amount of privacy online; but there's not much expectation of privacy in public places. (Not zero, evidently -- Google blurs out faces on Street View, for example -- but not much.) And in this case, Google's not revealing personal data at all, they're finding and reporting industrial problems; their wide-ranging, unaccountable cyberstalking powers are very creepy, but this time they're being used for good.
williesleg 10y ago
Yeah, that's no big deal. Here we had a natural gas leak, in the street, I called the utility company, National Grid, and they said it didn't matter since it was out in the street and not in a house. That was about 5 years ago. So it still leaks. And they just jack up our bills.
ChuckMcM 10y ago
This strikes me as an excellent IoT application, gas sensors are cheap and simple SMS texting could send a message from an IoT device that it detected gas and its GPS co-ordinates.
- ars 10y ago
  > gas sensors are cheap I wanted to buy one to check my pipes for leakage, but the only inexpensive thing I could find was a go/no-go sensor, and nothing something with an actual reading.
  - ChuckMcM 10y ago
    This one (http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/Grove-Gas-SensorMQ2-p-937.html http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/Grove-Gas-SensorMQ2-p-937.h...) is $7, Its sensitivity can be adjusted by the pot, so putting a digital potentiometer on the board and driving it remotely should give you some "range". It isn't designed as a precision instrument but in an IoT situation just watching sensors detect something over time, correlated with wind speed and direction, should give useful information for the gas company at least. These guys (http://lmsnt.com/applications/applicationideas/ch4/ http://lmsnt.com/applications/applicationideas/ch4/) will sell you a sensor development kit. The commercial instruments are all several hundred dollars but my experience with specialty tools is that they have high prices to support high margins because they don't sell in very high volumes.
    - joshvm 10y ago
      There are a few factors. The gas sensors you can afford as a (poor) hobbyist tend to be resistive/heater devices. You heat up a catalyst and monitor its resistance which varies when a suitable gas is present. The downside is that typically they're sensitive to all kinds of gases - e.g. methane, ethanol other volatile organic compounds and so on. Either you can use them in a single-gas environment, or where you would only expect one polluting gas, or you can have a general threshold. Cheap and cheerful and nice for IoT home "air quality" sensors, but useless for real measurements. Most of the very expensive sensors - like the one you linked - have much higher specificity. That methane detector is optical and is tuned precisely for the IR absorption band of the gas. Optics and filters are expensive, plus the driving circuitry and probably NIST-traceable calibration if you want it. EDIT: It also uses a fairly unusual LED wavelength which adds to the price (InGaS = money). Other sensors, like Oxygen, have shelf lives of a few years and need to be replaced even though they're horribly expensive ($200 or so). A filtered methane sensor is about $50 (Figaro make a lot of nice gas sensors): http://microcontrollershop.com/product_info.php?cPath=301_428_579&products_id=6786 http://microcontrollershop.com/product_info.php?cPath=301_42... AMS also make some nice inexpensive general VOC sensors like this one: http://www.digikey.co.uk/product-detail/en/ams/AS-MLV-P2/AS-MLV-P2CT-ND/5117220 http://www.digikey.co.uk/product-detail/en/ams/AS-MLV-P2/AS-...
TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
From the article: residents paid as much as $1.5 billion extra between 2000 to 2011 for gas lost to leaks. Is anyone able to calculate approximate how much gas this is in volume or weight? 1.5 billion divided by residential gas price per unit?
- twinkletwinkle 10y ago
  Check out this chart from the Energy Information Administration: https://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/hist/n3010us3m.htm https://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/hist/n3010us3m.htm If you only want 1 sigfig, I'd say the price is about $10 per thousand cubic feet over that timespan. So that's 150 billion cubic feet? You could calc a mass if you knew the composition, or a weight if you knew the pressure.
- maxerickson 10y ago
  Call it $10 per thousand cubic feet. http://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/hist/n3010us3m.htm http://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/hist/n3010us3m.htm So 150 million units. Switching to the numbers I'm seeing quoted for pipelines, 150 billion cubic feet. This pdf lists many pipelines pushing 1 billion cubic feet or more a day: http://www.ferc.gov/CalendarFiles/20120830220205-primer.pdf http://www.ferc.gov/CalendarFiles/20120830220205-primer.pdf So at most a couple months of normal usage.
willcodeforfoo 10y ago
I wonder if accelerometer data would be useful to determine road quality? It may help cash strapped cities like here in Toledo prioritize the bumpiest roads to fix.
kaonashi 10y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyNeOKi2sO8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyNeOKi2sO8
known 10y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unintended_consequences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unintended_consequences
janesvilleseo 10y ago
Slightly off topic, but one idea I had was for Google to share road usage stats with cities and businesses. Right now cities put out an air tube on the road that counts the cars. Google could provide much more insight given they already can tell you road congestion. They could give it away for free to a city and/or make businesses pay for it.
- aganders3 10y ago
  I think this is a service Strava offers, but for bicycles.

245 points by state_machine 10y ago

More details on the program: https://www.edf.org/climate/methanemaps https://www.edf.org/climate/methanemaps and the other cities they've mapped: https://www.edf.org/climate/methanemaps/city-snapshots https://www.edf.org/climate/methanemaps/city-snapshots

mturmon 10y ago
Thanks for pointing this out. I understand that EDF was the driving force behind this initiative, but the fact that the sensors were mounted on Google cars seems to have diverted attention from that fact. There's a growing effort to monitor CO2, CH4, and CO at very fine spatial scales, and to do inverse modeling to infer emission rates ("fluxes") from the snapshots. (E.g., https://megacities.jpl.nasa.gov/portal/ https://megacities.jpl.nasa.gov/portal/)

andrenotgiant 10y ago

Another hint at what is to come when Google starts organizing the world's _offline_ information. Google Books and Google Streetview are just the tip of the iceberg. I would be willing to bet that "massively distributed real-time data collector" was listed as a key business case by whoever pitched self-driving cars at Google.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

Animats 10y ago

That's useful. The mapping cars could carry some other useful sensors. Air quality is obvious. Less obvious is RF leakage from cable TV cable, which can interfere with other spectrum users. Cable companies used to have to check this every two years, but they lobbied to not have to check it.

LeoPanthera 10y ago
I'm a Radio Ham, and the biggest source of RF noise is arcing power lines, and those powerline ethernet adapters some people use instead of wifi. Arcing power lines can be tracked down with with a shortwave radio and reported, but the powerline adapters are a nightmare. They're suppposed to notch out the amateur radio bands but many do not, often swamping everything from 3 to 30MHz with noise.
- ChristianBundy 10y ago
  Is there a reason they don't mess with UHF? Studying for my ham exam as we speak.
  - LeoPanthera 10y ago
    UHF does not propagate through power lines, the frequency is too high.
  - srl295 10y ago
    Because they don't operate in the UHF bands' frequencies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadband_over_power_lines#Implementation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadband_over_power_lines#Imp... says "0-30MHZ" (that's the HF bands) "and sometimes as high as 80Mhz" (50Mhz would be 6-meters)
- street 10y ago
  What about those adapters causes the issue? Is it the devices themselves emitting radiation? The cabling in a house?
  - upofadown 10y ago
    The cabling radiates like crazy at those frequencies. Interestingly enough, there is enough radiation that you don't really need an actual connection. Someone put one of the endpoints in a field with a generator and got a connection to another endpoint. In a sense power line adapters are just using radio over the air. Sending data over a power line, even at low bit rates is very difficult to do reliably. So all the radiation is in a sense a feature in that it improves connectivity. Not so much a feature to those who have an actual licence to use those frequencies...

danso 10y ago

Is the collected raw data available? Would be interesting to cross-reference what the Google cars found with 311 complaints. Here's NYC's 311 data: https://nycopendata.socrata.com/Social-Services/311-Service-Requests-from-2010-to-Present/erm2-nwe9 https://nycopendata.socrata.com/Social-Services/311-Service-... ...I recall there being a category for people calling in gas odor, but the Socrata site seems to be slow/down at the moment.

dfc 10y ago
It looks like NYC is not in scope: > Dallas is one of nine participating cities, including > Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago and Jacksonville. This program > was developed with scientists from Colorado State Univ

godgod 10y ago

Google collecting anything scares me.

alex_g 10y ago

Why are these sensors not placed on garbage trucks or police cars?

danso 10y ago
Bureaucracy, most likely. As a researcher, attaching sensors to public vehicles is an arrangement that you'd have to make separately with each jurisdiction. With Google, there is just one jurisdiction to negotiate with.
- BHSPitMonkey 10y ago
  Waste collection services are often privatized. They probably don't need the city's permission to collect environmental sensor data.
asdfologist 10y ago
What did they say when you suggested this to your local sanitation and police workers?
HeyLaughingBoy 10y ago
So, you put the sensors on municipal vehicles. Then what? Who pays for the data upload and storage? Who pays for sensor maintenance? Who looks at it and interprets it? Who gets the benefit? From the POV of a local government official, I'll bet this looks like a way to throw money down a rat hole and be voted out for doing so.
- beamatronic 10y ago
  A local municipality can just sell/lease the space on the vehicle. The city provides 12v power and sheet metal space for bolting on a box. In return they get monthly cash payments.
  - pbhjpbhj 10y ago
    Insurance companies that have GPS trackers / driving analysis boxes could add sensors and sell that data too.

retox 10y ago

And all they had to sacrifice was personal privacy!

AckSyn 10y ago
Like all great futuristic advances we've seen in the last two decades that REALLY put us into the "we're living in the future" category, there's a plus and negative side. I love that I can wear a watch that doubles as a phone, health monitor, gps/mapping, mp3 player, etc. The flip side of there being a loss of privacy would both be technological (weak or no security in the device itself or the apps and services it uses) and political (government saying "give me all the data"). This cry of "but my privacy!" is nothing more than a useless complaint, and does nothing to address the problem. We as citizens and consumers of such great tech NEED to demand better device security as well as political reform. Changes in how things are done and why. So be picky about which tech you buy and politicians you vote. Be picky with your time, money, votes. Don't, however, waste time on comments that do nothing to address the problem. That includes providing no information to further advance your ideology: privacy. No product endorsements to sway us into purchasing or supporting something which WILL keep your private info out of nosy third-party hands, or info about politicians or policy we should be aware of? That would be a pointless comment when you obviously care about something.
clock_tower 10y ago
I don't carry a smartphone, I don't have a Facebook account, and I use NoScript, so I have a certain amount of privacy online; but there's not much expectation of privacy in public places. (Not zero, evidently -- Google blurs out faces on Street View, for example -- but not much.) And in this case, Google's not revealing personal data at all, they're finding and reporting industrial problems; their wide-ranging, unaccountable cyberstalking powers are very creepy, but this time they're being used for good.

williesleg 10y ago

Yeah, that's no big deal. Here we had a natural gas leak, in the street, I called the utility company, National Grid, and they said it didn't matter since it was out in the street and not in a house. That was about 5 years ago. So it still leaks. And they just jack up our bills.

ChuckMcM 10y ago

This strikes me as an excellent IoT application, gas sensors are cheap and simple SMS texting could send a message from an IoT device that it detected gas and its GPS co-ordinates.

ars 10y ago
> gas sensors are cheap I wanted to buy one to check my pipes for leakage, but the only inexpensive thing I could find was a go/no-go sensor, and nothing something with an actual reading.
- ChuckMcM 10y ago
  This one (http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/Grove-Gas-SensorMQ2-p-937.html http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/Grove-Gas-SensorMQ2-p-937.h...) is $7, Its sensitivity can be adjusted by the pot, so putting a digital potentiometer on the board and driving it remotely should give you some "range". It isn't designed as a precision instrument but in an IoT situation just watching sensors detect something over time, correlated with wind speed and direction, should give useful information for the gas company at least. These guys (http://lmsnt.com/applications/applicationideas/ch4/ http://lmsnt.com/applications/applicationideas/ch4/) will sell you a sensor development kit. The commercial instruments are all several hundred dollars but my experience with specialty tools is that they have high prices to support high margins because they don't sell in very high volumes.
  - joshvm 10y ago
    There are a few factors. The gas sensors you can afford as a (poor) hobbyist tend to be resistive/heater devices. You heat up a catalyst and monitor its resistance which varies when a suitable gas is present. The downside is that typically they're sensitive to all kinds of gases - e.g. methane, ethanol other volatile organic compounds and so on. Either you can use them in a single-gas environment, or where you would only expect one polluting gas, or you can have a general threshold. Cheap and cheerful and nice for IoT home "air quality" sensors, but useless for real measurements. Most of the very expensive sensors - like the one you linked - have much higher specificity. That methane detector is optical and is tuned precisely for the IR absorption band of the gas. Optics and filters are expensive, plus the driving circuitry and probably NIST-traceable calibration if you want it. EDIT: It also uses a fairly unusual LED wavelength which adds to the price (InGaS = money). Other sensors, like Oxygen, have shelf lives of a few years and need to be replaced even though they're horribly expensive ($200 or so). A filtered methane sensor is about $50 (Figaro make a lot of nice gas sensors): http://microcontrollershop.com/product_info.php?cPath=301_428_579&products_id=6786 http://microcontrollershop.com/product_info.php?cPath=301_42... AMS also make some nice inexpensive general VOC sensors like this one: http://www.digikey.co.uk/product-detail/en/ams/AS-MLV-P2/AS-MLV-P2CT-ND/5117220 http://www.digikey.co.uk/product-detail/en/ams/AS-MLV-P2/AS-...

TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago

From the article: residents paid as much as $1.5 billion extra between 2000 to 2011 for gas lost to leaks. Is anyone able to calculate approximate how much gas this is in volume or weight? 1.5 billion divided by residential gas price per unit?

twinkletwinkle 10y ago
Check out this chart from the Energy Information Administration: https://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/hist/n3010us3m.htm https://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/hist/n3010us3m.htm If you only want 1 sigfig, I'd say the price is about $10 per thousand cubic feet over that timespan. So that's 150 billion cubic feet? You could calc a mass if you knew the composition, or a weight if you knew the pressure.
maxerickson 10y ago
Call it $10 per thousand cubic feet. http://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/hist/n3010us3m.htm http://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/hist/n3010us3m.htm So 150 million units. Switching to the numbers I'm seeing quoted for pipelines, 150 billion cubic feet. This pdf lists many pipelines pushing 1 billion cubic feet or more a day: http://www.ferc.gov/CalendarFiles/20120830220205-primer.pdf http://www.ferc.gov/CalendarFiles/20120830220205-primer.pdf So at most a couple months of normal usage.

willcodeforfoo 10y ago

I wonder if accelerometer data would be useful to determine road quality? It may help cash strapped cities like here in Toledo prioritize the bumpiest roads to fix.

kaonashi 10y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyNeOKi2sO8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyNeOKi2sO8

known 10y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unintended_consequences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unintended_consequences

janesvilleseo 10y ago

Slightly off topic, but one idea I had was for Google to share road usage stats with cities and businesses. Right now cities put out an air tube on the road that counts the cars. Google could provide much more insight given they already can tell you road congestion. They could give it away for free to a city and/or make businesses pay for it.

aganders3 10y ago
I think this is a service Strava offers, but for bicycles.