Directive 60: What Alberta’s New Edition Actually Means for You

On December 13, 2018 the AER released a new edition of Directive 060, which includes the updates required to industry flaring, incinerating, and venting practices for the reduction of methane emissions from the upstream oil and gas industry. As an oil and gas professional, you know compliance to Directive 060 is essential to your company’s success. In this blog, we’ll give you a quick overview of the AER’s most significant changes to Directive 60, along with a helpful tip for centralizing all of your emissions data to ensure your company’s consistency and transparency. 

Significant changes to Directive 060:

• Enforcement of a site Overall Vent Gas limit (OVG) of 15.0 E³m³/month/site or 9.0 tonnes of methane/month/site
• Enforcement of a site Defined Vent Gas limit (DVG) of <3.0 E³m³/month/site or <1.8 tonnes of methane/month/site starting January 1, 2022 (which includes venting from pneumatic devices, glycol dehydrators, and compressor seals)*
• Requirement to prevent or control vent gas from existing pneumatic level controllers, and other pneumatic instruments by January 1, 2023.
• Enforcement of existing reciprocating compressor seal fleet vent gas limits of <0.83 m³/hour/throw, with no compressor venting gas over 5.00 m³/hr/throw, and periodic compressor seal testing requirements.
• Enforcement of triannual or annual fugitive emissions surveys, depending on facility type.
• Submission of an Annual Methane Report to the AER.
• Record keeping requirements for 4 years of all inventory, emissions, calculations, and documentation of all the requirements within Section 8.

Learn More: Read all the new requirements when you refer to Section 8 of the new Directive 060

Respond to New Editions of Directive 060 with Confidence

These new requirements dramatically increase the amount of information companies, like you, will have to track and manage on a monthly and annual basis, to ensure compliance with the limits and emissions reduction requirements.

If you need help performing the emissions calculations required by this new edition of Directive 060 for the Annual Methane Report, we can help! Envirosoft’s Emission Manager application gives you the confidence you need to calculate, manage, and report greenhouse gas emissions and intensities along with criteria air contaminant emissions. Event better, our software allows you to centralize all of your emissions data, including all federal and provincial greenhouse gas and air contaminant reporting, ensuring consistency and transparency. Lastly, you can also use Emission Manager as the analysis tool to provide the data to kickoff emissions reductions projects, and demonstrate reductions achieved on completion of the project.

*As of 2022, DVG now excludes pneumatic, glycol dehydration, and compressor seals.

For more information on Envirosoft's Emission Manager  application, schedule a demo with us!