Project Egypt
Technology to enable widespread availability of greenhouse gas data and insights
What is Project Egypt focused on?
Greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations have continued to grow, fueling the climate crisis. Yet, measuring GHG emissions efficiently and at scale remains surprisingly elusive due to the lack of geographically fine-grained data.
Project Egypt aims to develop technology to democratize GHG data through large-scale monitoring. Our goal is to quantify emissions with at least an order of magnitude lower cost and form-factor compared to state-of-the-art solutions, paving the way for extensive deployments of GHG sensor networks.
Project Egypt’s vision includes:
Enable low-cost emission monitoring: By designing a practical GHG sensor with sufficient resolution, we aim to allow for precise source apportionment.
Wide deployment of low-cost GHG sensors: Provide real-time, hyper-local GHG emission monitoring to identify local, rural, and urban emission sources, evaluate their impact, provide measurable carbon footprint data, and monitor the effectiveness of actions over time.
Democratize GHG data: Making GHG data accessible and actionable for everyone.
Towards low-cost GHG sensor networks
Unlike air-quality sensors which are now cheap and common, GHG sensors remain expensive and bulky. Quantifying atmospheric emissions of gases such as methane or nitrous oxide, two of the potent GHG, still, requires expensive, lab-grade, complex instruments; monitoring stations are sparse. Acquiring, publishing and modeling data is a costly and time-consuming process.
Methane has 80 times the warming potential of CO2 in the near-term while nitrous oxide over 280 times. Currently, satellite-based efforts are typically used to map methane emissions and detect high-emitters. Such missions are invaluable but alone they cannot provide the hyper-local and real-time monitoring of GHG necessary to evaluate and address medium to smaller local sources or intermittent emitters. Miniaturised, low-cost technology will also be key to to enable scalable emission monitoring in parts of the world with limited resrouces and infrastructure.
Sensor Technology. Project Egypt aims to develop miniaturized, low-cost greenhouse gas sensor technology leveraging Data-Center and Cloud technologies. Our goal is to de-risk technologies such as silicon-photonics to detect gases like methane at concentrations of a few parts-per-million (ppm) or lower. If successful, this will pave the way for increased sensor sensitivity and high-volume production using conventional CMOS fabrication infrastructure.
Emission modelling through sensor networks. We are collaborating with academic partners to quantify the value of local emission measurements using a network of low-cost devices, with a current focus on methane. Traditional studies and models often rely on sparse deployment of expensive, high-resolution instruments. Our objective is to model the deployment of hundreds of low-cost devices across urban and rural areas of interest.
You cannot manage what you cannot measure!
Project Egypt aims at revolutionizing the state of the art in GHG emission monitoring and accounting.
- The availability of real-time, local emission data will be crucial for the world’s efforts against the climate crisis. Currently, such data is not available beyond small-scale, disconnected efforts due to high deployment and operational costs. This data can help tackle emission sources, aid scientists in understanding how the changing climate affects natural fluxes of GHG for sinks and sources, raise public awareness, and lead to effective government policies to limit emissions.
- Focusing on methane, low-cost sensor networks for emission monitoring can unlock the necessary data in critical business sectors such as agriculture enabling them to implement more sustainable practices and reduce their carbon footprint.
Our collaborators
The climate crisis is a global challenge that no single organization can tackle alone. GHG emission monitoring is no different. To turn our vision into reality, we are collaborating with leading experts across many areas, including high-precision laser spectroscopy and low-cost air quality environmental measurements.
