APPLIED GEOSCIENCE
To be environment friendly and reduce its carbon footprint, the oil and gas industry has to invest in the science and tech- nology of carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS), which currently plays a minimal role in the industry. As of 2019, there were only 17 operating CCUS plants in the world, capturing 31.5 million tons of carbon dioxide annually (Fajardy et al., 2019); most of these were industrial not power plants (Element Energy, 2018).
In the past decade the shale oil revolution in the USA has doubled the country’s oil and gas production. Nevertheless, the shale drilling and production technologies are far from perfect, and the shale revolution is still limited to a few basins in the USA. Some of the challenges facing the shale oil industry include:
• Avoiding gas flares in shale oil fields (and instead uti- lizing this natural gas resource)
• Reducing water consumption for hydraulic fracturing (or even adopting dry gas for fracking)
• Reducing methane emissions from the operating fields • Control and mitigation of induced seismicity • Optimization of well placement • Treatment and reuse of produced formation waters
• Characterization and modeling of porosity and perme- ability types in mudrock/shale reservoirs
• Developing well logging technologies specific for mudrock/shale formations
• Shale structural geology and fracture mapping and analysis
• Modeling and calibration of hydrocarbon generation- migration-accumulation systems in shales
• Quantification of generated, migrated or residual hydrocarbons in shale plays.
To reduce its E&P costs and increase its profit margin, the petroleum industry must adopt smarter and more efficient methods. Some of the suggestions in this regard made by the survey participants include:
• Smart databases incorporating the 150-year legacy data in new digital formats
• Applications of machine learning and artificial intel- ligence to petroleum data analysis and interpretation
• Integrating petroleum geoscience and engineering in the industry’s workflows
• 4D modeling and improved subsurface mapping and imaging
• Improved recovery factors of oil and gas from reservoir formations
Energy Resources
Closely associated with the state of the petroleum industry is the energy transition. The world (as well as the geoscience community) is facing a huge dilemma. On the one hand, the catastrophic threat of global warming (mainly from the burn- ing of fossil fuels) is an urgent call to move toward energy sources with the least carbon footprints. On the other hand, coal, oil and natural gas still account for 85% of the world’s energy supplies, and a rapid transition to replace these energy-
58 TPG •
Jul.Aug.Sep 2021
Figure 2 - 2050 projection of energy production by sources (EIA/DOE, 2020)
dense fossil fuels will pose formidable political, economic, and technological challenges. Added to this dilemma is the fact that global energy demand will grow (not decline) in the coming decades as the flow of abundant, affordable and dependable energy is critical to life standards of the developed world and development of low-income nations. These trends provide geo- scientists with both challenges and opportunities in exploring and developing energy resources. For developing renewable energy sources and massive electrification of transportation to replace oil, exploration and production of energy minerals (such as rare earth metals for wind turbines and lithium and cobalt for batteries) will be crucial.
The energy scenario in the coming decades will be a mix- energy market (Figure 2), in which several resources and industries will compete for investments and profits as well as sustainability and social license to operate (SLO) (Figure 3).
Figure 3 - Various levels of Social License to Operate (SLO) for companies, as a measure of their social accountability, acceptability, and support (modified from Thomson and Boutilier, 2011)
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