Phoning in the Founders

Jim Maslanik during one of his research trips in the Antarctic.

Earthview wouldn’t have happened without our in-house scientist and co-founder Jim Maslanik. Growing up outside Pittsburgh, Jim was the second one in his family to go to college. He studied Forestry at the University of Pennsylvania and always wanted to have a career that would have field work so he could be outside and try to make sense of how things worked. His first job out of school was a Lewis and Clark-esque field position mapping the history of the loss of forests along the Mississippi. 

Jim moved out West to Colorado and continued his studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He started pursuing a PHD in geography and began working with a professor who was an Arctic climate expert. This took Jim on multiple adventures to the Antarctic and the Arctic and this is where Jim started seeing the effects of climate change.

After travels to the Arctic, Jim returned to Boulder and was a research professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences. After a successful career at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Jim retired and started working on a passion project of fighting climate change through reducing methane emissions. He started making methane sensors and would drive them around to see if they could detect methane leaks. 

Jim and Bear met through a colleague, and it was a match made, if not in ‘heaven’ certainly in the atmosphere! Together with their previous experiences and Jims methane sensor, they started Earthview.

After retiring from the University of Colorado, did you have any idea of what you wanted to pursue next? 

I was always impressed with the aerospace engineering students and their abilities to build things. Once I retired, I decided to learn some of the skills they had in terms of building electronics and software and that sort of thing. That thought process led me into building the methane sensor that Earthview uses today. 

When did you realize methane was a problem?

It has been a big deal in the Arctic for quite a while in terms of people knowing that the potential for big releases of methane was always there. Methane wasn't something that I was directly researching, but I was always aware of it. 

Once I retired, I decided to pursue the idea of monitoring menthane further. Initially, I started brainstorming to see if there was something I could put on a car and drive around and monitor methane and then that snowballed into seeing if I could put something on small aircrafts to monitor much bigger areas. So, it wasn't part of my research at CU, but it's something I started thinking about after I retired and then really dove head first into in the last few years. 

You realized there was a massive methane issue and no one was really doing anything about it yet. How did you turn this idea into a reality and how was Bear brought into all of this? 

This friend of mine was working for a company that had a contract with the National Science Foundation and they were flying a plane out of Boulder airport. He knew Bear and he knew I was building this Methane sensor and so initially, we were going to try to put the methane sensors on the big research aircraft to see if that was a viable option for detecting methane.

I went over to the Boulder airport and I started making conversation with people from the company Bear was working for, and after he had left that company, he reached out to learn more about the methane sensor I was building and to see if there was a future with my instrument. That's where the idea for Earthview really took off. 

Methane mitigation and independently certified gas are hot topics right now, how does Earthview fit into this conversation?

There has to be some way of getting an idea of how much methane is being emitted from sites. If an operator is going to be certified, they're going to need some data to be able to use as backup to prove that they're making an effort to minimize their emissions, so you're going to need some kind of measurement set up on the oil pads. 

The typical way of going out once every few months, or even yearly, with a thermal camera and looking for leaks is not as effective as continuous monitoring. Operators need some measurement that can be used as justification for proving that they are doing everything they can to minimize leaks.

That's where Earthview comes in. I think that the measurement side of things needs to be independent from the group that's doing the certification. There shouldn't be any crosspollination between the certification group and the measurement group. We fit in as a trustworthy, reliable independent measurement source. 

What would you say the general reaction is that you're seeing from oil and gas operators? 

I've been surprised by how positive things seem to be with gas operators. I've been pleasantly surprised that we can actually get our products out there and that Earthview is seen as a positive product that is helping operators keep methane in their pipes and out of the atmosphere!

What is one word that comes to mind when thinking about Earthview? 

Potential is what popped into my head. Yeah, Earthview has so much potential and I just know that once this takes off we can really make a difference. 

What is one thing you want people to know about Earthview? 

We can really make a difference. I think with what we offer, I know it will have a significant impact and I'd be really annoyed if we don't get a chance to do that. 

If you want to learn more about Earthview and how we are solving the methane emissions monitoring problem, please visit our website at Earthview.io.