Feb-2024

A path to net-zero emissions for the oil and gas industry

Digitalisation and automation will be key to cleaner extraction, processing, and transportation of hydrocarbons

Bill Roberts
Rockwell Automation

Article Summary

Several oil and gas companies have committed to achieving net-zero emissions by 2050. However, given how carbon-energy-intensive oil and gas operations are, what will it take to meet that goal? In addition, many site locations are remote, and these companies have vast global infrastructures to decarbonise.

To put it simply, oil and gas companies will need to use an all-of-the-above approach to achieve their emissions reduction goals and meet market demands for lower-carbon fuel sources. It will certainly require measuring their carbon footprint, investing capital to change their product energy mix, and buying carbon offsets, to name a few.

Oil and gas companies will need to rethink their business models and even their role as energy providers in the future. They will need to transform their operating processes and change their energy sources. Finally, they will need to measure and report their energy usage and emissions in their operations to continuously monitor, measure, and improve their carbon footprint.

While the journey to net-zero emissions may still hold a lot of unknowns, a couple of things are certain. First, oil and gas companies need to act now. A milestone date like 2050 may seem far away, but strategic efforts such as capturing and sequestering carbon or transitioning production to cleaner energy sources like hydrogen require major capital investments. These projects will take years, even decades, to complete and require investment, innovation, and re-engineering of their infrastructure.

Leading oil and gas producers realise this, which is why they are making big moves today. ExxonMobil, for example, announced late last year that it will spend $17 billion on its lower-emissions initiatives up until 2027. That spending will go toward helping ExxonMobil and its customers reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Efforts such as the company’s 2030 emission-reduction plans are expected to reduce upstream greenhouse gas intensity by 40-50% compared to its 2016 levels.

A second certainty is that automation and digitalisation platforms will greatly influence decarbonisation in the oil and gas industry. Automated and digitalised operations are simply more efficient. Automated processes can run with fewer manual steps, require less staffing, and may be operated remotely. Digitalised operations make data available for enhanced decision-making from the facility to the enterprise level. Digital operations can capture energy usage, monitor assets to predict production issues, as well as prevent upsets and their associated emissions.

However, automated and digitalised operations can do more than support and optimise existing processes – they can unlock entirely new business value to significantly reduce emissions across the enterprise.

Integrating digital platforms within existing and future facilities can move operations from manual to autonomous. Oil and gas producers will benefit from less manual or, in some cases, unstaffed site operations. Autonomous operations will first require reliable and secure connectivity to a remote operations centre for decision support. Remote autonomous operations will require self-diagnostic assets that can monitor and even adjust to changing process conditions on their own.

Emissions measurement tools
For companies to manage their carbon footprint, they must first measure it. Specifically, they need to measure their Scope 1 (direct) and Scope 2 (indirect) greenhouse gas emissions.

By measuring their emission sources, companies can establish emission baselines by asset or facility to identify strategies and investments that make the biggest emissions-reducing impact. Emissions measurement is also essential to accountability. Companies need accurate emissions data to track how  they are performing against their emissions-reduction targets and report progress to key stakeholders, including management, investors, and government regulators.

Modern automation platforms connect to edge devices and process data like burner temperatures, fuel consumption, and flaring models to accurately quantify a site’s carbon footprint. Companies may need to unlock this data and develop ‘energy consumption models’ for reporting. In some cases, the data can be made available by using totalisers in the control system code to quantify energy data for reporting.

Of course, individual data points alone do not tell a complete story. The data collected from processes may require data from multiple sources and needs to be organised and contextualised into meaningful information across the enterprise. This is only possible if the right digital platforms are in place.

A key to capturing and orchestrating a company’s data at the enterprise level is leveraging open, high-speed communications protocols such as EtherNet/IP and OPC UA. These protocols or connectors establish unified data taxonomies to egress large amounts of process data into a unified digital platform. Not all automation systems use these protocols, so some companies may need to modernise their automation systems or build interfaces or extractors to collect the process data; otherwise, they risk isolating it. Once these data highways are in place, information technology (IT) and operations technology (OT) teams can work together to establish the carbon footprint at the enterprise level.

Cloud computing technology is another key component of digitisation. It provides a central platform for collecting, organising, and reporting data and sets a company up for a potential future shift to remote operations. The cloud also offers inherent sustainability benefits because it allows a company to share a portion of a third-party cloud infrastructure rather than building, running, and maintaining that infrastructure on its own.

Importance of cybersecurity
To leverage the cloud, robust cybersecurity is also essential. As oil and gas companies shift from hardwired to digitally connected systems, they must ensure those systems are well-defended against ever-evolving cyber threats, as such threats have disrupted oil and gas operations worldwide. Furthermore, if an attack compromises a company’s industrial safety systems, it can have physical consequences, putting people in danger and the environment at risk.

Cybersecurity frameworks (CSFs) such as the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) CSF provide good standards for automation systems. They give oil and gas companies a roadmap for managing supplier risks. Working with suppliers that comply with international security standards, such as IEC 62443, to ensure systems are cyber-safe can also help oil and gas companies reduce cyber risks in their supply chain. 

Once a foundation for seamless and secure data flow is in place, a company can layer on applications to get the full picture of its carbon footprint.