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LongPath is harnessing quantum technology to detect methane emissions from oil and gas operations, innovation that benefits industry and investors—and the planet. Most recently, LongPath received landmark financial backing from the Department of Energy (DOE) for a loan of up to $189 million to accelerate the scale-up of the company’s monitoring systems.

One winter evening in early 2013, Greg Rieker, associate professor of mechanical engineering in the College of Engineering and Applied Science, had a ‘eureka’ moment. He’d been working late for several nights, beaming a laser light out the window of the , trying to measure trace gasses in the atmosphere. It was a turbulent test environment compared to inside the lab, but the atmosphere was quieter at night, and he could ‘see’ the beam better without competition from the sun.

To detect trace gasses, he aimed a laser over one kilometer at a mirror which reflected the light to a specialized dual-comb spectrometer where the data were analyzed. In the return laser signal that night, Rieker saw carbon dioxide–indicated by dips or pauses in a graph on his computer screen–just what the team had spent months looking for. “I remember thinking, ‘We're really onto something,’” he said.

That ‘something’ was a technology that could accurately measure temperature and atmospheric gas concentrations over a ‘long path’. Not long after that night at NIST, Rieker began teaching at ���������� and split his time between campus and NIST. That’s when the Department of Energy (DOE) Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA-E) put out a funding call for low-cost ways to monitor methane leaks from oil and gas infrastructure to address environmental impacts.

Rieker answered that urgent need and landed the grant by fusing his open-path sensing with other critical NIST innovations (in work by Ian Coddington, Laura Sinclair and Kuldeep Prasad). He said that close collaboration between ���������� engineers and NIST physicists was key. “We were able to work together in a really unique way to think about (what would become the LongPath system) as a sensor,” he said.

The path to commercialization

In 2015, Marta Zgagacz, director of licensing for Venture Partners at ����������, began working with Rieker’s research team on their commercialization strategy. The researchers partnered with the university on the ARPA-E grant as well as on intellectual property rights and agreements while they were “figuring out the ecosystem around potential products,” said Zgagacz. “It seemed like the technology was solving a real problem, and I remember thinking, ‘Wow, this team is sorting out a solution that might actually work.”

Rieker recalled a busy time juggling a new lab on campus and teaching obligations with starting a company. He valued the crucial support from Zgagacz and others at the university. “No one at CU ever questioned or even implied that what I was doing was a bad idea. And that probably would not be true in other universities,” said Rieker. “Leadership has been thoughtful and encouraging, not discouraging��or even neutral. That has been fantastic.”

In those early days of moving out of the lab and into the field, LongPath’s founders—including Rieker, Caroline Alden, Sean Coburn��and Robert Wright—also leveraged other commercialization opportunities. They won what’s now the Lab Venture Challenge in 2017 and presented at