The Department of Energy gave a major boost Wednesday to a company working to track methane emissions across some of the most prolific U.S. oil and gas regions.
DOE’s Loan Programs Office announced the closing of a $162.4 million loan guarantee to LongPath Technologies. The funds will help the Colorado-based company build more than 1,000 remote monitoring towers to continuously scan for emissions of the greenhouse gas.
In a statement, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said blocking “harmful greenhouse gas emissions” from entering the atmosphere is a “key pillar” of the Biden administration’s agenda. DOE said the project is being financed through the Title 17 Clean Energy Financing Program created by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.
The LPO loan guarantee will support up to 24,000 square miles of monitoring, DOE said in a news release, and include sites in top-producing states such as Colorado, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Texas and Pennsylvania. LongPath’s planned monitoring network could prevent methane emissions equivalent to at least 6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide from going into the atmosphere per year, according to the Energy Department.
