Aquanta Vision Technologies, a Houston-based climate-tech startup, was selected to participate in the scale-up phase of Chevron Studio, a program that matches entrepreneurs with technologies to turn them into businesses. Aquanta's computer vision software automates the identification of methane in optical gas imaging (OGI). The technology originated from Colorado State University and CSU STRATA Technology Transfer.
Babur Ozden, a tech startup entrepreneur, along with Marcus Martinez, the lead inventor, and Dan Zimmerle, co-inventor and director of METEC at the CSU Energy Institute, came up with the technology to identify the presence and motion of methane in live video streams. Currently, this process of identifying methane requires a human camera operator to interpret the images. This can often be unreliable in the collection of emissions data.
Aquanta’s technology requires no human intervention and is universally compatible with all OGI cameras. Currently, only about 10% of the 20.5 million surveys done worldwide use this type of technology as it is expensive to produce. Ozden said he hopes Aquanta will change that model.
“What we are doing, we are democratizing this feature, this capability, independent of the camera make and model,” Ozden said.
Aquanta’s software will be downloadable from App stores to the technician’s computers or phones.
“Our goal is to eliminate the absolute reliance of human interpretation and to give operators a chance to make detections faster and more accurately,” Ozden said.