The U.S. has millions of both active and inactive oil wells, all of which are potential sources of methane leaks. If left unmonitored, wells like these can sometimes leak up to thousands of kilograms of gas per hour.
This year, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) put into effect a new regulation directing oil field operators to regularly audit methane leaks. In order to achieve this goal, oil companies need a way to continuously monitor these leaks, which is why a team of co-founders (including Dr. Sudhakar Puvvada, Jeff Cameron, Rohan Houlden, Mike Mills and David Posey) launched XD Sensor.
With co-founders spread from Cary to Greensboro, the startup creates oil field sensors that can detect methane, which is a major greenhouse gas that is responsible for nearly a third of global warming.
“It’s scary when you look at the areas where the leaks are occurring, over large geographical areas,” Co-Founder Sudhaker Puvvada said.
Current approaches for monitoring leaks can involve satellites, drones, or planes, but these solutions are very costly, and they are conducted only periodically—such as every few months—rather than on a non-stop basis.
With XD Sensor’s approach, several devices are placed on an oil field site, and then continuously sample the air to identify if methane is present. If the gas is detected in problematic quantities, the several sensors work together to locate where the leak is occurring, and this information is relayed to the oil field operators via a software service.
From there, the operators can take action to stop the leak. If the leak is above a certain threshold, the operators must also report it to the EPA under the aforementioned new regulation.
“There’s the technology interest in it because it’s wireless—and it’s interesting because that’s what I’ve spent a long time doing—but then there’s actually some benefit to humanity if we’re able to solve this problem,” Co-founder Jeff Cameron said.
XD Sensor is a part of this year’s RIoT Accelerator Program (RAP), which is a 12-week program for early-stage startups. (GrepBeat has previously covered several of XD Sensor’s fellow RAP cohort members, including Baby Bumps, CSPM Zero, Social Cascade, Soffos, and Synergize.) Cameron said the program has brought them back to the fundamentals of entrepreneurship, and he hopes to continue to develop XD Sensor’s customer discovery process throughout the program.
The startup’s initial target market consists of small- to medium-sized oil and gas operators, which may oversee up to several hundred oil wells each. Some of these wells can be drilled up to half a mile deep in the ground, at which point equipment failure can occur due to mechanical issues or movement underground, causing leaks.
XD Sensor’s expected revenue model is a combination of the price for the hardware as well as a SaaS subscription for the cloud platform.
Judging by the prototypes XD Sensor has already produced, the sensors will ultimately be about the size of a football or smaller. The sensors are designed to use cellular or satellite networks to put the data they collect in the cloud; the customer would then have access to the data on a website. Through this process, customers can view real-time measurements and set notifications for alerts when leaks occur.
Many oil sites are unmanned most of the time, and have pumps working continuously with periodic inspections. When XD Sensor sends an alert, the operators will be notified to immediately inspect the site where the leak is.
In addition to mitigating the impact of leaks, Cameron said XD Sensor is also providing its customers with an easy-to-deploy solution, diminishing the burden of the new regulation in a cost-effective manner.
The six co-founders, who are all working part-time, have a wide range of industry expertise, from electrical engineering to startup mentorship. Puvvada even has experience working on reduction in plastic usage, which he said was a “natural offshoot” to XD Sensor.
Because the product will need EPA approval, which can require a long process, the launch of XD Sensor is currently scheduled for 2026.
