Energy Conversion and Management: X (Jan 2022)
Optimised site selection of hybrid renewable installations for flare gas reduction using Multi-Criteria decision making
Abstract
Gas flaring is an alarming issue for oil and gas fields across the globe which can be reduced by utilizing the waste flare gas to produce power using hybrid renewable energy systems. While installing the hybrid renewable energy systems at oil and gas fields, one of the critical concerns is the selection of the right location as it ensures high productivity and efficiency of the system throughout the system life-cycle. The presented research aims to select suitable sites for three different hybrid renewable energy systems installations for oil and gas fields. A novel combinational multi-criteria decision-making approach has been presented for site selection. Three methods, namely - equal distribution, intuitive distribution, and AHP, have been proposed to determine the weights of the criteria. After weight determination, the modified ‘technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution’ (TOPSIS) has been applied to determine the rankings of suitable gas flare locations. The proposed combinational algorithm has been tested for selecting the site for installing three different hybrid renewable energy system configurations. The resultant closeness to ideal solution indexing (Ci) concurs to choose the same locations for all three cases with a variation of 1.32% in Ci only. The concurrency of results for all the cases using different criteria weights proves the accuracy of the modified TOPSIS algorithm for assigning the rank of locations. The modifications in the existing Multi-Criteria Decision-Making methods are a necessary contribution of this paper as the current practices work well with either quantitative or qualitative data but are insufficient to deal with the complex (partially qualitative and quantitative) data obtained from the oil and gas fields. The oil and gas flaring locations are ranked based on ecological, technical, and sociological parameters for installing the hybrid renewable energy systems to reduce gas flaring and generate power from waste gas flares and other available renewable energy sources.
