Energy Strategy Reviews (Jan 2023)
Oil and gas pathway to net-zero: Review and outlook
Abstract
Global climate changes urge prompt energy transition for less carbon emissions, from traditional fossil fuels to renewable and sustainable clean energy. However, in reality, the world's energy majority cannot make U-turn immediately to renewables or clean energy due to the immature technology readiness, insufficient resource availability and unstable energy supply. In the next few decades, the fossil fuels, particularly oil and gas, will continue acting as the primary energy sector. Thus, instead of absolutely abandoning fossil fuel and seeking for impractical carbon mitigation technologies, to decarbonise the oil and gas will be definitely feasible and contribute more to net-zero transitions. This study, initially put eyes on the oil and gas decarbonization, critically reviewing the oil and gas resources, technologies, policies, and their futures toward net-zero. Basically, the status of oil and gas resources from different global regions, including the details of reserves, productions, consumptions, are summarized and analyzed. Moreover, the oil and gas technologies are categorized as gas, thermal and non-thermal, new recovery methods, each of which is specifically discussed in the applicable reservoir, mechanism, features and examples. Then, the global carbon emissions are reviewed in perspectives of emissions from fuel types and world regions as well as mitigations policies. Accordingly, the carbon mitigation approaches, specially in the oil and gas industry, are collected and listed from enterprise managements and technology renovations. Lastly, based on all the information and analyses and assisted with IEA energy outlook report, we provide a potential pathway for the oil and gas towards carbon neutral. This paper provides comprehensive overview on the oil and gas pathway to net-zero, which will not only technically guide the oil and gas decarbonisations, also be of interest to wide-range readers who are not experts but intend to understand the energy transitions.
