How petroleum engineering skills are supporting green energy

How petroleum engineering skills are supporting green energy

With oil companies increasingly coming under scrutiny for their contribution to global warming, its appropriate that the skills used to exploit fossil fuel reserves are now focussed on green energy projects and help to achieve their goals of net zero carbon contribution.

OPC is actively involved in several projects looking to minimise carbon emissions and reduce climate change.

Carbon Storage

The concept of carbon capture, usage and storage (CCUS) has long been hailed as crucial in mitigating climate change. After a number of false starts, the technology is now growing with more momentum than ever. Today, there are over 19 large-scale CCUS facilities in operation worldwide, while a further 32 in development.

OPC has worked on one such project, providing expert production engineering and PVT analysis on the technical challenges of injecting CO2 into an abandoned gas reservoir.

Piers Johnson, OPC Managing Director said;

“We have the advantage of actually having worked on this reservoir when it was developed and operational decades ago.  We can use our knowledge of the reservoir characteristics to build different scenarios of how it will react to the CO2 injection process. Theoretically the reservoir should be able to store decades of CO2 emissions for hundreds of years.”

OPC is a key part of the technical expertise investigating how CO2 can be captured from the emissions of a power station, piped offshore, injected and secured in the abandoned reservoir.

 

Integrated offshore power generation, capture and storage

OPC is providing a technical review of the data and plans for an innovative project which plans to generate electricity from gas offshore, capture and inject the CO2 into a well offshore. We are providing expert review on medium to long term production can be achieved from the reservoir to be economic.

Geothermal drilling

First used in Italy in 1904, geothermal has been a consistent – and expanding – source of energy in recent years.  The USA and Iceland are world leaders due to the active geothermal fields they have, but many countries are now recognising the potential of the technology.  Wells can be drilled and the technical challenges of drilling geothermal wells are similar to oil and gas wells.  OPC has worked on a number of drilling projects worldwide and has a number of new projects identified for 2021.

In addition to drilling the geothermal wells, interpretation of seismic data across the area can help identify the optimum location for the wells.

Please contact Piers Johnson for more information on OPC services to support green energy projects.

Piers Johnson
Managing Director
+44 20 7428 1111
piers.johnson@opc.co.uk

Related posts

By using this website you agree to accept our Privacy Notice and Terms & Conditions