Abstract
Methods used for emission aggregation and allocation have significant impacts on life-cycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emission estimates for oil and gas products; however, because of limited data availability for upstream and mid-stream oil and gas operations, the influence of the allocation technique has not been extensively explored in previous studies. GHG emissions associated with oil and gas production and processing in the Eagle Ford Shale (with 34 gas processing plants and classified into 12 production regions) are estimated, using data from 2013, at three different scales of spatial aggregation (production region, gas plant and basin levels), to characterize the spatial variabilities in GHG emissions within the Eagle Ford Shale. GHG emissions per energy content of oil and gas products vary from 3.4 to 14 g CO2e/MJ among the regions within the Eagle Ford Shale, and from 3.5 to 23 g CO2e/MJ when assigned at the individual gas processing plant level, with a basin average of 6.8 g CO2e/MJ. GHG emissions are also disaggregated at the equipment and operations level and allocated to gas and/or oil products. Using this disaggregated allocation method, a basin-wide average of 9.5 g CO2e/MJ GHG emissions are allocated to gas products and 3.5 g CO2e/MJ are allocated to the oil product. These emission estimates are compared to benchmark emission estimates from other datasets. This study provides insights into how choices of aggregation and allocation level influence GHG emission estimates for oil and gas products.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 17065-17073 |
| Number of pages | 9 |
| Journal | ACS Sustainable Chemistry and Engineering |
| Volume | 7 |
| Issue number | 20 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Oct 21 2019 |
Funding
This paper is based upon work supported primarily by the National Science Foundation under Cooperative agreement no. EEC-1647722. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. The authors declare the following competing financial interest(s): This work was supported by National Science Foundation (NSF) through Center for Innovative and Strategic Transformation of Alkane Resources (CISTAR). One of the authors (DTA) has served as chair of the Environmental Protection Agencys Science Advisory Board (20122015; in this role, he was a paid Special Governmental Employee); DTA has current research support from the National Science Foundation, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, the Gas Technology Institutes Collaboratory for Advancing Methane Science, and Exxon Mobil Upstream Research Company. Over the past five years, he has also worked on methane emission measurement projects that have been supported by multiple natural gas producers and Environmental Defense Fund. DTA has done work as a consultant for multiple companies, including British Petroleum, Eastern Research Group, ExxonMobil, and Research Triangle Institute, and SLR International.
Keywords
- Eagle Ford Shale
- allocation methods
- greenhouse gas (GHG)
- life-cycle assessment (LCA)
- upstream oil and gas production
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- General Chemistry
- Environmental Chemistry
- General Chemical Engineering
- Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment
