thereby reducing the associated emissions. This far-reaching initiative touches many aspects of a company’s operations, infrastructure, and production, and might be as simple as upgrading insulation for a given asset, improving heat integration or reducing flaring, or as complex as installing tunable diode laser spectrometers in furnaces to analyse the composition of gases to reduce excel air; in short, the more energy efficiently a plant runs, the less carbon it emits. Historically, financial concerns motivated companies to optimise their value chains and invest in unified supply chain planning, scheduling, and optimisation. However, given the recent proliferation of ESG factors, oil and gas companies must now consider the cost of carbon alongside traditional financial concerns. As such, companies must rely more than ever on digital tools to explore windows of opportunity, both financially and in terms of carbon intensity. For example, they should further explore consolidated process optimisation models, using real-time data to minimise carbon emissions within their operational and economical constraints. Also, decision-makers should use a unified supply chain approach that allows them to model both the financial and carbon intensity implications of sending a particular crude slate through a refinery. What’s more, given the host of complications carbon trading has introduced, companies must integrate carbon accounting across the
value chain. Without quality, contextualised, and managed operational and carbon data, it is impossible to track and trade carbon, whether as carbon weight tonne per product produced (CWT) or carbon dioxide equivalent (CO 2 e), a task that requires transparency, consistency, and verifiability among a sea of private and regulatory stakeholders. Companies must add a carbon chart of accounts to their financial and operational charts of account. To have confidence in a carbon registry, though, they must be able to abstract, normalise, and contextualise their carbon data, the data must be verifiably high quality, and distributed account technologies, enabled by blockchain and other cybersecurity measures, must enable the secure trade and transfer of the carbon credits. In a broader sense, too, companies must adapt and evolve their business strategies to include decarbonisation solutions and services. Many early adopters of decarbonisation strategies have founded alternative energy divisions within their companies, which are specifically tasked with public-facing ESG initiatives, such as adding electric vehicle (EV) charging and hydrogen fuel to the traditional transportation fuels they offer at their service stations. Companies must evolve their business strategies and brand to ensure access to capital and positive support for their stock. An effective integrated digital operational and decarbonisation data, analytics, and decision support strategy is critical. strategically electrify assets and the required upgrade of the electrical infrastructure as needed to meet their decarbonisation goals. While not every asset can be converted to electric power, by reducing the amount of fossil fuels used on site, companies can curb their Scope 1 and 2 emissions, leading to more sustainable production processes. Conventional steam generators, for example, can be exchanged for low steam-load electric assets. The electrification of assets, however, is often limited by electrical infrastructure. With the electrification of assets and integration of renewable sources such as wind or solar comes a predictable increase in electricity demand, intermittency, and more, larger loads with associated startup and shutdown Going electric and renewables sourcing It is likewise imperative that enterprises
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There are safety issues to overcome as well as efficiency issues; presently, it takes about three times as much energy to move hydrogen through a pipeline as it 28
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