World’s first mobile greenhouse gas lab hitting the road in NZ

The world’s first mobile greenhouse gas lab is hitting the road to help New Zealand meet its net-zero 2050 target.

The CarbonWatch-Urban mobile lab was designed to play a key role in helping scientists understand how much carbon dioxide is released in urban areas.

GNS Science carbon cycle scientist Leigh Fleming told 1News the electric van is decked out with state-of-the-art technology which is powered by a stack of rechargeable batteries.

“We have an instrument that measures carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases.”

Fleming explained one of the instruments is so sensitive that the team could see peaks in greenhouse gasses when a car drove past the van.

GNS principal scientist Jocelyn Turnbull said a black carbon aethalometer helped her team work out the amount of CO2 coming from traffic and wood burning.

Also onboard is a special sampler which allows scientists to collect air in two-litre flasks for further analysis and a GPS to record where the air was collected.

“If we actually want to fix emissions everywhere, we need to know about everywhere, not just one or two big cities," she said.

Turnbull explained only a handful of urban areas had the instrumentation to achieve this until now, making it difficult to get accurate information into the hands of decision makers.

“You can actually count what you think your emissions are, how many cars are there, how much fuel are we selling, but sometimes when you do that, you miss things.”

GNS senior electronics engineer Benjamin Lennard told 1News fitting all the equipment inside was no easy task.

“It’s a matter of figuring out how much each piece of equipment weighs and where we’re going to put it because we can’t have too much on one side,” Lennard said.

The mobile lab will start out on the streets of Wellington over the next few months before heading to 15 other locations across the country from October.

“We're trying to make sure that we have covered different-sized towns and cities, different kinds of industry and climate regimes, so we're really getting that whole variety,” Turnbull said.

Turnbull said researchers will combine the atmospheric measurements with cutting-edge flux modelling to create maps of emissions and sinks over space and time.

“The end result will be highly detailed and spatially resolved information, enabling Government, iwi and industry to better monitor emissions, target mitigation and develop low-emissions policy.”