The Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) announced this month that its Shah oil field has achieved a fieldwide carbon intensity of 0.1 kg of CO2e/BOE.
Located 230 km south of Abu Dhabi, the onshore Shah field produces around 70,000 B/D of crude. ADNOC said it reached the new benchmark through field development optimization programs, digitalization, and the use of artificial intelligence (AI).
The company also highlighted that the Shah field is partially electrified using nuclear and solar energy.
"Technology is essential to ADNOC's journey towards net zero, and this milestone at Shah demonstrates our commitment to sustainability and innovation,” Musabbeh Al Kaabi, ADNOC upstream CEO, said in a statement.
ADNOC attributed part of the success to its use of liquid ejector technology at the field, which recovers and reuses waste gas. Recent advancements in this technology have reduced costs and pumping requirements.
Ejectors function as gas compressors, leveraging Bernoulli’s principle, which states that as fluid velocity increases, pressure decreases. In flare-gas recovery applications, low-pressure flare gas is drawn into the ejector and compressed to a higher pressure as it exits.
The field is also benefiting from ADNOC’s AI-Enabled Centralized Predictive Analytics Diagnostics (CPAD) program. The system analyzes and detects anomalies, defects, and other issues across thousands of pieces of rotating equipment, including more than 270 pumps and compressors.
Introduced in 2019, the CPAD program has shown notable results. In a technical conference paper presented in 2023 (OTC 32150), ADNOC reported that CPAD improved production availability by up to 3%, reduced maintenance costs by 20%, and avoided up to 4% in production losses by identifying potential failures or underperformance early.
For Further Reading
OTC 32150 Centralized Predictive Analytics & Diagnostics (CPAD) Program by M.A. Al Hendi, F.M. Al Alawai, S.A. Eisawy, and A.O. Al Abdouli, ADNOC.
