Exploring Green Energy Applications in the Oil and Gas Industry

Abstract With the ongoing paradigm shift in the Oil and Gas industry towards greener alternatives with net-zero objectives, several developing technologies have been recently deployed or proposed as promising solutions. The overall goals are to decrease carbon footprint and improve the projects’ economics and net present value (NPV). This study outlines the latest developments with underlying principles, practices, and economics. This holistic approach encompasses the overall feasibility with the challenges and the benefits. A comprehensive literature survey has been carried out on publicly available data to provide the theoretical background, rationale of use, screening and selection criteria, difficulties, and the workarounds. Systems to integrate the green methods with the respective oil and gas processes appear in detail, from screening to implementation. We outline economics under various scenarios with CAPEX methods and OPEX-intensive approaches to maximize the NPV. The technical details of the integration under multiple conditions that affect the system's efficiency, such as weather, seasonal temperature changes, wind, and solar exposure, have been investigated. Efficient integration of the selected green methods with the associated oil and gas process proves to be a concrete step towards a net-zero objective. Such integration brings additional benefits of improved economics with minimal effects in terms of capital intensiveness or other burdens on the overall economics. These items range from solar thermal applications in heavy oil recovery to heat recovery from the produced fluids, biomass, geothermal, wind, and wave for offshore processes. Cases with multigreen energy methods, such as solar and heat recovery, demonstrate promising outcomes. This article examines some of the latest green methods with various aspects corresponding to the selected oil and gas processes. We specifically focus on energy generation through standalone green methods and extracting energy from oil and gas processes in a greenway. The overall objective is to close the current gap in the literature.