TRAcking Carbon Emissions Chair
Description: The purpose of TRACE is to develop new technologies for the accurate quantification and monitoring of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, at local scale for industrial sites with arrays of low-cost sensors, and with a global coverage with space-borne instruments. These technologies address the need of public and private sector stakeholders to measure the effectiveness of GHG emission reductions based upon independent observations, in the context of policies and measures established after the Paris Agreement on Climate. Thales Alenia Space, a leading satellite-manufacturing company, will lead the development of a new line of space-borne GHG-measuring instruments to be launched within the next 10 years, with the end-to-end simulation platform developed in the project, that will allow to assess the uncertainties on GHG emissions directly from instrumental characteristics and parameters. SUEZ-Environment and TOTAL, two global commercial operators in the waste and energy sectors, will pilot the development of new and cost-effective methods to measure GHG emissions, for industrial sites and urban sources, with a priority on methane fugitive emissions from landfills, wastewater processing plants, refineries and gas extraction facilities. To do so, the involved laboratories will test new low cost sensors, improve their performances by tests in the lab, and then deploy them in the field. The proposed research will help the corporate partners to match their products to new regulations and policies to quantify and reduce GHG emissions from the scale of a single industrial site, up to an emitting region, thanks to the global coverage of satellite observations. The project will mobilize 40 researchers in three teams at the Laboratoire des Sciences du Climate et de l’Environnement (LSCE) with support from Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique (LMD) on the Paris-Saclay campus. The TRACE project addresses the three main objectives of the ANR 2017 call by - Creating a strategic long-term partnership between three major industry players and leading researchers; - Training young scientists and staff from corporate partners; - Developing the potential of the scientific teams in the field of GHG emissions monitoring technologies, an international research challenge; - Facilitating the development of a future operational GHG emission monitoring system. The work-plan is organized into one training component and two complementary scientific components, focused respectively on satellite GHG emission measurements, and on in-situ sensors to track emissions from industrial sites and urban sources.
Funder: Agence Nationale de la Recherche
Amount: €750,000
Funding type: grant
Funder scheme: CHIN
Start date: 2017-10-01
Investigator: Philippe CIAIS
Institution: Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines
Funded outputs count: 32
Funder award ID: ANR-17-CHIN-0004
OpenAlex ID: G4041540887