Opinion: How Oil and Gas Can Reduce Carbon, Increase Profits

After 2020 saw a record-breaking drop in global carbon emissions, 2021 has seen our numbers bounce back to near pre-pandemic levels. It would appear that “business as usual” will continue to hold back many companies’ ultimate goal for the long-term reduction in their carbon footprint. The oil and gas industry is no different. How will the oil and gas industry simultaneously maintain or surpass their current production levels, while also pushing the industry closer to becoming a greener and more sustainable operation?

Ensuring that all processes are optimized and performing at peak efficiency becomes paramount to this goal. Instrument malfunction, shutdowns and delays become not only economical hindrances for oil and gas companies, but ecological as well. Industrial automation has a major bottleneck in regards to instrumentation failure due to the harsh conditions that these processes are operated within. Many existing oil and gas facilities have to schedule frequent maintenance and planned shutdowns as instrumentation ceases to work properly which affects overall productivity. Across all refineries in the U.S. and Canada, there were more than 2,000 unexpected shutdowns in a single year, a fact that pretty clearly illustrates that process control is not functioning at the highest level it is capable of.