BAKU, Azerbaijan, Nov.21
By Leman Zeynalova – Trend:
Oil and gas companies will need to figure out how to produce more oil and gas (and increasingly power) year after year while also being carbon-conscious and addressing stakeholders’ sustainability concerns, Trend reports citing Deloitte’s 2020 oil, gas and chemical industry outlook.
For this purpose the companies need four concrete steps, according to Deloitte.
“First, companies should identify low-hanging fruit for reducing greenhouse gas emissions like eliminating methane leaks from existing infrastructure. Second, a few have deployed renewables to reduce emissions from field operations; more companies should follow suit. Third, CO2 enhanced oil recovery could be an avenue to boost production while sequestering carbon, but it remains a niche industry today—more companies should evaluate such opportunities. Lastly, fresh water use and waste water disposal continue to challenge shale producers; more should invest in the infrastructure to sustain operations not just in 2020 but for years to come,” reads the report.
The energy transition is a long-term trend, but Deloitte has seen a greater focus on this in 2019, which it expects to gain momentum in 2020.
“Fossil fuel demand is widely expected to peak around the midcentury, but there is not a clear consensus about when. Some forecasts project combined oil, gas, and coal consumption to plateau by 2030, whereas others do not see a peak until after 2050. Uncertainty is not new to the industry. Oil and gas companies are used to uncertainty not only in highlevel outlooks and scenarios, but also in commodity prices, technologies, and geopolitics. The energy transition, however, poses entirely new challenges for these companies and could prove disruptive to longstanding market structures, value chains, customer preferences, and the economic drivers for the oil and gas business,” reads the report.
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