The petrochemical industry in Europe directly employs more than 300.000 people in Europe. Indirectly it generates three or four times dis number of jobs in user industries across Europe and petrochemical producer contribute 155 billion € to the overall European GDP.
The development of methods for the measurement of fugitive emissions in the petrochemical industry. This presentation will inform the conference on some recent and current activities the authors of this paper are undertaking to develop methods (standards and protocols) for fugitive emission measurements.
This paper summarizes the results from several leak detection and repair (LDAR) field campaigns that compared two methods for the detection of refinery fugitive VOC emissions: Sniffing and Optical Gas Imaging (OGI). Both of these methods are described as Best Available Techniques (BAT) in the EU BAT Reference (BREF) document for refining of mineral oil and gas. Sniffing is a traditional method defined by standards and OGI is a newer technique offering considerable advantages. The comparison of these methods was made quantitative by using a bagging technique to explicitly measure emission rates. It was found that Optical Gas Imaging was very successful in finding the majority of the mass emissions and therefore can be considered as effective as Sniffing and as a standalone leak detection and repair method.
Rod is an international authority on industrial emissions measurements and is on the Management Board of the UK's Source Testing Association. He has previously been the Quality Officer and Chairman. He consults for the UK Environment Agency in this context, and has been invited to give a keynote presentation at the last four annual conferences of the US Source Evaluation Agency.
Expert knowledge of atmospheric chemistry and environmental science with demonstrated ability to analyze and communicate results to enhance decision-making and policy implementation.
PIN 27.2 Apr/May 2026
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