Energy transition of Oil and Gas Platforms

Oil and gas platforms today are still powered prevalently by fossil fuels, mainly embodied by gas turbines. Power generation is one of the largest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions and global warming. Moreover, oil and gas production operations are the make up the largest cut of pollution caused by the oil and gas industry. The increase in human population and the economic growth, continuously increase the demand on fossil fuels for energy production, which become more and more scarce with time. Consequently, energy prices with the current world energy mix reality are very volatile, thus rendering access to energy often too costly and insecure. Moreover, price fluctuation is induced by geopolitical discrepancies. A large role in the challenging price of power generation on oil and gas platforms is also played by emission taxes imposed by many authorities around the world. Therefore, it is in everyone’s favor to look forward to ecological energy transition initiatives to promote a secure, sustainable and affordable energy future. From this point of view, this paper describes conventional power generation methods currently used on oil and gas platforms, thus proposing plausible alternative methods to exploit renewable energy sources in the environment surrounding the platform, Later, as renewable energy is often attributed to excess energy production, this surplus in energy can be used to produce hydrogen by hydrolysis, which may be either used as a source of energy to power some already existing gas turbines, or even be implemented for methane production along with CO2 affluent often produced with the gas stream. The methane produced can increase the production rates of the platform, while using renewable energy for the process and reducing the platforms emissions and operation costs. Finally, transition of oil and gas energy production towards renewable energy sources is done in hopes of stimulating this research to promote sustainable and efficient energy production and expand it to a larger scale.