Blockchain in oil and gas industry: Applications, challenges, and future trends

Abstract

Today's systems, approaches, and technologies leveraged for managing oil and gas supply chain operations fall short of providing operational transparency, traceability, audit, security, and trusted data provenance features. Also, a large portion of the existing systems are centralized, manual, and highly disintegrated, which make them vulnerable to manipulation and the single point of failure problem. In this survey, we explore the potential opportunities and applications of blockchain technology in managing the exploration, production, and supply chain and logistics operations in the oil and gas industry as it can offer traceability, immutability, transparency, and audit features in a decentralized, trusted, and secure manner. We discuss state-of-the-art blockchain-based schemes, research projects, business initiatives, and case studies to highlight the practicability of blockchain in the oil and gas industry. We present the potential opportunities brought about by blockchain technology in various use cases and application scenarios. We present several systems that use blockchain-based smart contracts to automate critical services such as petroleum product tracking and tracing, international trade document protection, and coordination of purchasing and bidding activities for granting oil exploration rights to petroleum exploration and development companies. Finally, we present open challenges acting as future research directions.