Globally, oil and gas producers face the challenge of reducing emissions to achieve more sustainable operations.

In this podcast episode, I’m joined by Emerson’s Manuel Arroyo and Stan Calame to discuss a new white paper, "Mitigating Emissions from Wellhead to Custody Transfer," which the oil & gas industry team has developed to highlight technologies and solutions that help oil & gas producers address this challenge.

Give the podcast a listen, read the whitepaper, and visit the Oil & Gas Industry section on Emerson.com for ways that Emerson can help you drive lower emissions and more sustainable operations.

Transcript
Jim: Hi, everyone. I'm Jim Cahill. And welcome to this "Emerson Automation Experts" podcast. Emissions mitigation remains a major challenge for oil and gas producers. I'm joined today by Manuel Arroyo and Stan Calame to discuss ways that technology is helping in these mitigation efforts. We'll dive into some of the issues and how they are being solved. Many of the things we will discuss have been captured in a new white paper developed by the oil and gas industry team. Welcome, Manuel and Stan.

Manuel: Morning.

Jim: Hey, great having you joining us today. So I guess, Manuel, let's dive right in. What inspired the creation of the white paper? And what gap in industry knowledge or practice were you aiming to address?

Manuel: Thank you for that question, Jim. There are so many different reasons that inspired Stan, myself, and some other members of the team to write this paper. So the first one, it was there are new regulations that they were recently approved, but the new administration is changing the course of those new regulations. So there are new areas that have been targeted, and there is a lot of questions about how you can tackle this, how you can do this, how you can do the other.

And then on the other hand, we have seen a lot of new technologies available and be present for just monitoring, and look at where the emissions are, trying to quantify those emissions, so on and so forth, but not really much focused on mitigation. That is the end goal. At the end, what we don't want to is increase those emissions, is just mitigate. So that's what this paper is focused on, those different technologies that they go and tackle and mitigate from the source, and how to prevent those emissions. So that's basically it. It is not a gap of knowledge, it is just a gap on the focus, on the main focus on these that for us it is mitigation more than just monitoring.

Jim: Okay, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Now I noticed in the paper that it said 75% of methane emissions occur at production sites. What are the most overlooked sources of these emissions, and why do they persist despite ongoing mitigation efforts?

Manuel: Yeah, that's another good question or questions, right? The number seems to be high, that's for sure. But we need to consider that that's where the gas is produced. That's where everybody should expect the most amount of emissions or the main source of emissions. So 75% seems to be extremely high, where it's extremely important to highlight what the industry has been able to do. They reduced 13% emissions or methane emissions on the gas, even that the gas production increased 101%. And the oil production increased 53% in between 2005 and 2021.