Prospects of energy recovery in offshore oil and gas operations

Abstract

Offshore oil and gas platforms are one of the energy industries that generate huge amount of waste heat and CO2 emission that cause environmental impacts. This paper performed an investigation on the potential source of waste heat on the offshore oil and gas operation. Brief explanation on the standard operating strategy of the offshore platform was given and the processes that released huge amount of recoverable waste were emphasized. The waste heat recovery (WHR) is a method of capturing and transferring the waste heat from a process with gas or liquid to the system as an additional energy source. Technologies that were utilized by previous researchers were reviewed and the future direction on the waste heat recovery of offshore operation was described. The oil extraction and processing platform which is also known as the “Central Power Platform” was discovered to be the main source of waste heat and the processes involved were the potential candidates for waste heat recovery. Although there have been studies utilizing different technologies on the waste heat recovery of offshore oil and gas sector, more improvement could be made in the future to the efficiency of the power system by applying other WHR technologies such as turbo compound or combination of several WHR technologies to recover more waste heat, hence reducing environmental impacts.