COVER STORY: GRANDPERSPECTIVE GMBH
Grandperspective’ s mapping technology is particularly effective in providing safety teams with highly intuitive imagery- even if the chemical cloud would be invisible to the human eye. The real-time location of a leak can be plotted on a map or onto a satellite image of a plant. If there is an incident, real-time mapping would allow a safety team to not only precisely determine where the cloud is situated, but where it is travelling. This makes it easier to contain the situation, determine which areas to cordon off, identify where workers need to take shelter, and assess when de-escalation is possible once the event has cleared.
Indeed, in multi-chemical settings such as Chemelot, where our clients often are monitoring many different compounds in their facilities, they tell us that the ability to continuously and autonomously scan them in real-time is a game-changer.
This is because it allows them to detect a leak not only where they would expect the leak to see it, but also where they wouldn’ t.
Point sensors often can’ t identify the unexpected
Why? Well let’ s explore the alternative. Point sensors in a multi-compound environment can never truly provide full coverage. That’ s because point sensors provide a reading for one or a few compounds at best. This means if a facility produces multiple compounds, it will need to massively increase the number of sensors. Plant managers recognise that this simply isn’ t possible due to the spiralling costs and so they reluctantly accept that they cannot provide complete monitoring coverage. Therefore, often a multi-compound facility will deploy a state-of-the-art-fixed compound sensor. But even if it can achieve low-detection limits, it is still a fixed-point sensor, and therefore is only effective at detecting smallscale leaks in the area of the plant that it is deployed. But what if a leak unexpectedly appears in another part of the facility, which is not manned by a similar sensor? This creates a dangerous blind spot, and it is this lack of visibility which may lead to an incident.
So the ability to know‘ what is out there?’ is as powerful as it is compelling, particularly for multi-compound chemical parks, which do not share the same collaborative process safety vision as the one deeply embedded at Chemelot. Facilities that do not share process safety sensor technologies, may be able to detect a dozen or more chemicals with their own sensors. But what happens when a compound cloud, which is beyond the range and scope of their sensors, is blown in from another facility? Are they going to buy another expensive sensor to detect a chemical that they do not produce? Perhaps, or maybe they will charge the chemical producer where the leak originated from? But what if it refuses to pay? This is a real-world problem that many of our customers in geographies outside of Europe have faced and remote sensing technology provides them with the real-time visibility they often lack.
8 FUGITIVE EMISSIONS JOURNAL • APRIL 2025