Net Zero Technology Centre

Six months ago, if asked what the biggest challenge was facing our industry and perhaps the world, I would have said, “The transition to a low-carbon/net-zero world.” Who knew that the biggest threat would actually be an invisible, but devastatingly brutal, enemy? And what impact will that have on our futures? Not only on our commitment to net zero but to our industry’s survival and to the industrialized world we know. There will be many views, but as I lead a technology organization, I believe we can use this “industrial reset” to chart a new course for our industry and hopefully for our planet. This is a time for us to capitalize on the amazing collaboration we have seen locally, regionally, and globally, as society has pulled together to fight COVID-19. Can we not put this can-do attitude into action on our biggest global challenges and work together to find a solution? While many of the changes required will be either behavioral or regulatory, a number will be technology-led - and that is where technical industries can have the biggest positive impact in the coming years. As I look around the world, I can already see countries launching major public/private initiatives to grasp the low-carbon agenda. These are partnerships where businesses innovate and collaborate, with government backing, to create powerful collectives driving both decarbonization and economic growth. I strongly believe this is the route we should take in the UK - forming deep collaborations to capitalize on our expertise and collective know-how to transform the North Sea into a low-carbon powerhouse. Progress Made So Far The good news is, we have already begun. The UK Continental Shelf has already committed to a net-zero future in the industry’s Roadmap 2035, introduced by Oil and Gas UK. The Oil & Gas Technology Centre (OGTC) has been supporting the industry with more than £150 million co-invested in emerging technologies in the past 3 years. And in 2019, we opened a center dedicated to the development and deployment of net-zero technologies. We have worked closely with industry to develop a technology vision and road-map that focuses on three big goals: Reducing emissions from existing operations Developing new technologies - including carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) and also hydrogen - to unlock the potential of our assets and expertise Transforming to a net-zero industry in the longer term No one imagines this will happen overnight - the Committee on Climate Change, for example, recognizes that oil and gas production will continue to 2050 and beyond - but at the same time, it predicts massive growth in other sectors, most notably in offshore wind, blue hydrogen, and CCUS. The current confluence of global challenges, therefore, offers a huge opportunity for the industry to set itself new goals on efficiency, performance, carbon footprint, and the transition to a net-zero future.

There has been a recent increase in the use of controlled-source electromagnetic (CSEM) surveys in the exploration for oil and gas. We developed a modeling scheme for 3D CSEM modeling in the frequency domain. The electric field was decomposed in primary and secondary components to eliminate the singularity originated by the source term. The primary field was calculated using a closed form solution, and the secondary field was computed discretizing a second-order partial differential equation for the electric field with the edge finite element. The solution to the linear system of equations was obtained using a massive parallel multifrontal solver, because such solvers are robust for indefinite and ill-conditioned linear systems. Recent trends in parallel computing were investigated for their use in mitigating the computational overburden associated with the use of a direct solver, and of its feasibility for 3D CSEM forward modeling with the edge finite element. The computation of the primary field was parallelized, over the computational domain and the number of sources, using a hybrid model of parallelism. When using a direct solver, the attainment of multisource solutions was only competitive if the same factors are used to achieve a solution for multi right-hand sides. This aspect was also investigated using the presented methodology. We tested our proposed approach using 1D and 3D synthetic models, and they demonstrated that it is robust and suitable for 3D CSEM modeling using a distributed memory system. The codes could thus be used to help design new surveys, as well to estimate subsurface conductivities through the implementation of an appropriate inversion scheme.

The controlled-source electromagnetic (CSEM) and magnetotelluric method (MT) are two techniques that can be jointly used to explore the resistivity structure of the earth. Such methods have, in recent years, been applied in marine environments to the exploration and appraisal of hydrocarbons. In many situations the electric properties of the earth are anisotropic, with differences between resistivity in the vertical direction typically much higher than those in the horizontal direction. In cases such as this, the two modes of the time-harmonic electromagnetic field are altered in different ways, implying that the sensitivity to the earth resistivity may vary significantly from one particular resistivity component (scalar, horizontal or vertical) to another, depending on the measurement configuration (range, azimuth, frequency or water depth). In this paper, we examine the sensitivity of the electromagnetic field to a vertically anisotropic earth for a typical set of configurations, compare inversion results of synthetic data characterizing a vertically anisotropic earth obtained using the isotropic and anisotropic assumptions and show that correctly accounting for anisotropy can prevent artefacts in inversion results.