Best Available Techniques Applied to the Offshore Oil and Gas Industry

Abstract

ABSTRACT Best Available Techniques (BAT) is a principle originally defined in the EU directive on Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control (IPPC). The overall ambition of the directive is to reduce emissions and impacts on the environment as a whole. The purpose of a BAT assessment is to identify the technique with the best environmental performance among all available techniques for a certain industrial application. Such assessment should also take into account technical and economic constraints. A wide variety of industries fall under the scope of the IPPC requirement for BAT in Europe. The BAT approach is more and more applied in countries outside of EU, and adopted by private organisations as a best practice. In the offshore Oil & Gas industry in Norway, for instance, the BAT approach is now applied to many systems, such as power generation, produced water management, VOC recovery, or, more recently, leak detection and remote sensing. The particularity of the site-specific constraints as well as a lifecycle perspective, typical of the offshore Oil & Gas industry, makes the application of the BAT approach challenging for this sector. Best Available Techniques for offshore applications are therefore site-specific, and require a case by case assessment. In addition, in countries such as Norway, there is no guideline or directive describing how to perform a BAT assessment, which hence needs interpretation and adjustment for each individual application. DNV has developed a methodology for BAT assessments specifically for the offshore industry. This methodology is based on a ranking of the environmental performance as well as technical feasibility, reliability and costs of available industrial concepts. The approach is applicable to various stages of offshore Oil & Gas projects. This paper will describe the BAT methodology for the offshore Oil & Gas industry, and give relevant examples of its application to various systems commonly found on offshore facilities. Challenges and future opportunities will also be presented and discussed.