Introduction
The objective of this newsletter is to discuss the options available to decarbonise a modern, large capacity FPSO. The second part of this paper will be issued soon and will discuss similar options for an FLNG. A glossary of terms used is included in section 9. Typical large FPSOs have multiple sources of environmental emissions, both to air and to sea. Technology exists to significantly reduce or eliminate these emissions, however, until recently, few projects have gone beyond the minimum level needed to comply with local regulations. Pressure is now mounting to reduce emissions further for several reasons.
Firstly, there is Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) pressure from stakeholders to reduce the environmental impact – both from internal stakeholders (staff) and external stakeholders (host governments, shareholders, media, and the public). Secondly, Financial Institutions are becoming more selective in the projects they finance (due to their own ESG pressure) and are likely to favour those which can show low carbon footprints. Thirdly, the application of Carbon Tax, either imposed externally by local authorities or internally as a project sanction test, will also drive projects towards lower emissions. For all these reasons, technologies to reduce emissions are growing in importance, and we expect these to be widely applied soon.
Baseline
To help illustrate the potential to decarbonise, we have calculated the typical baseline emissions from a large modern FPSO. We have selected a typical generic FPSO for Pre-Salt Brazil as a reference case, with an oil capacity of 150,000 bpd, a gas production capacity of 400 MMscfd, and a water injection capacity of 250,000 bpd. We have illustrated the main sources of emissions from this type of unit in Figure 1 (see page 7). We have calculated the total CO2 equivalent emissions for this Reference FPSO, using GWP to convert hydrocarbon emissions back to CO2e. We used vendor data for fuel demand and corrected this for gas turbine partial loading. We find total CO2 equivalent emissions are around 660,000 TPA, at full capacity, which is broken down as shown in Figure 2 below.
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