Environmentally Friendly Ways of Oil Production

First of all, we must recognize that we will be living with oil & natural gas for at least a few more decades if not longer while transitioning to alternatives.

With higher emphasis on reducing/eliminating carbon footprints and carbon emission taxes, Oil & Gas companies are looking for better solutions while maintaining/increasing profits. From our experiences, there are many different ways of producing a barrel of oil, some are more environmentally friendly than others.

In the past and up to now the majority of traditional oil production around the world are done by:

1.      Drill the oil wells and produce them until they are exhausted, then

2.      Inject water to produce more oil from mature wells. In the case of viscous oil inject steam to loosen the oil, then

3.      When oil production is exhausted from water injection

a.      Inject chemicals to produce more oil, or

b.      Inject Nitrogen in a few cases, or

c.      Inject associated gas or enriched gas or CO2 often in combination with water (Water-Alternating-Gas, WAG)

Oil production under (1) to 3(b) do not have any element of carbon reduction/elimination and usually involve significant carbon emission in doing so. In the best case is no flaring and the worst case is where the produced associated gas is vented or flared. For example, the chemicals used for oil field injection involved carbon emission during the manufacturing process. Most of the world’s oil production today are in categories (1) and (2) without any carbon sequestration. 

By accelerating the adoption of 3(b) in oil fields around the world we will dramatically reduce carbon emission by storing carbon in the reservoir when oil is produced. Why do we need to wait 50 to 100 years of oil production before we use the oil field for carbon sequestration? Our experiences from around the world have shown that we can start carbon sequestration from the beginning of oil field life rather than wait and often that will yield the maximum profits.  The following Figure, shows how 1 metric ton of CO2 can turn from a negative $40 of carbon tax into a positive profit of $125 when stored in the oil field in many countries. The carbon emission tax in such country as Norway is much higher than $40 per ton.

The following Figure shows how Carbon can be captured from the manufacturing processes such as making hydrogen, fertilizer, etc. and then stored in the subsurface oil reservoirs and thus increasing oil production/recoveries.

Since the 1980’s myself and senior members of my team have been working on various technologies to maximize economic oil recovery while minimizing green house gas emission. We believe that oil production with carbon sequestration is the most environmentally friendly for oil productions today and the future. This is an economically proven way of oil production in the USA since the 1970’s. However, outside of the USA there have been very limited applications, often due to a lack experiences.

ZERO EMISSION IS GOOD FOR THE OIL BUSINESS BOTTOMLINE.

Please, let me know if you like to discuss more.

Son Do

On a related topic: Gas Is the New Coal With Risk of $100 Billion in Stranded Assets

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/gas-coal-risk-100-billion-040035252.html

The article mentioned new gas power plants will need carbon capture. After you capture the carbon you have to put it somewhere. Saline aquifer storage is a cost while oil field storage is a profit.

Another key point is "stranded assets" classical multi-decades approach to oil & gas fields development put your assets at risk of being "stranded assets". Implement CO2 EOR/sequestration from the beginning of field development could shorten field life down to 20 years while classical oil field development could take 100 years to fully recovered all the reserves. Countries like Venezuela, Iraq... is at risk of having 10s even 100s blns of barrels of oil reserve being at risk of "stranded assets".