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July 4, 2025

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Operations

Ground Truth Matters: Why Equipment Inventory Is the Missing Link in Emissions Reconciliation

Author

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Larry Toube

Amid growing adoption of measurement-informed inventories—whether for OGMP 2.0, Subpart W, or internal ESG tracking—operators are investing heavily in aerial surveys, continuous monitors, and portable detection tools. But even with millions of dollars in sensors flying over assets or pinging in real time, many still run into the same bottleneck: no one knows exactly what’s out there.

The emissions aren’t the hard part. The equipment inventory is.

What Regulators and Voluntary Frameworks Are Now Asking For

With the updated Subpart W rules (December 2023) and OGMP 2.0 Level 4/5 expectations, emissions reporting has moved beyond rough facility-level estimates. Operators are now expected to:

In short, whether you’re submitting to the EPA or reconciling OGMP numbers with third-party reviewers, you’re expected to connect the dots from a methane plume to the specific valve, flange, or compressor responsible.

And most operators can’t do that. Not because they lack data, but because they lack a current, structured, and queryable inventory of their emitting equipment.

The Inventory is the Foundation

A good inventory isn’t a spreadsheet. It’s a system.

It should tell you:

If a leak is detected on a flyover or by a continuous monitor, and your team has to guess at what’s nearby or rifle through PDFs to identify the equipment, your reconciliation effort will fall apart.

You don’t just need data—you need context.

How SensorUp Solves the Equipment Inventory Gap

SensorUp enables operators to build and maintain living equipment inventories that feed directly into emissions reconciliation workflows:

The SensorUp platform enables detection data to be attributed to specific equipment and categorized within relevant reporting equipment groups, along with a detailed explanation.
Historical leak data on the SensorUp platform can be used to identify and report leaks to their relevant programs and categories, such as the "Other Large Release Events" category in the updated Subpart W.


It turns a pile of disconnected detections into a structured system of record that supports not just regulatory compliance, but actual root-cause analysis and performance improvement.

Final Thought

You can’t reconcile what you can’t identify. And you can’t fix what you can’t find.

As the focus shifts from estimating emissions to understanding them, the companies that win won’t just be the ones with the best sensors. They’ll be the ones with the clearest line of sight between data and equipment—and a system that makes that possible every day.

SensorUp was built to be that system.