Saudi Aramco reinforces its commitment to reduce climate change-causing greenhouse gas emissions at Annual Oil and Gas Climate Initiative (OGCI) meeting

At the meeting, CEOs of OGCI’s 10 existing member companies and the three newly-joined members, discussed the industry’s approaches to decrease greenhouse gas emissions with key stakeholders. The OGCI also unveiled plans to reduce the collective, average methane intensity of members’ core upstream oil and gas operations to below 0.25% by 2025, with the ambition of reaching 0.2% corresponding to a reduction by one-third.

Amin H. Nasser, Saudi Aramco president and CEO, commented: “The climate change challenge has become one of the most important challenges facing humanity in our modern world. There is not one single entity, regardless of its influence, that can confront this challenge without collaboration and cooperation from various stakeholders. Thus, today’s announcement by the OGCI further reaffirms the ambition of its members of major oil and gas companies, to be part of the global solution to addressing the climate challenge. Saudi Aramco recognises the power of collaboration and partnerships and through the OGCI’s Climate Investments, we are harnessing our collective resolve, as well as our resources, talents and technologies, to find concrete solutions and accelerate the deployment of ground-breaking technologies across various industries.”

Announced in November 2016, OGCI Climate Investments (OGCI CI) aims to accelerate the deployment of new technologies for carbon capture use and storage and methane detection and mitigation among member companies and beyond. It will also identify ways to cut the energy intensity of both transport and industry. Working in partnership with like-minded initiatives across all stakeholder groups and sectors, the OGCI CI believes its emission reduction impact can be multiplied across industries.

Nasser added: “At Saudi Aramco, we are leveraging our industry leading position to pursue a comprehensive strategy to tackle the climate challenge, to protect the environment and to achieve high levels of performance. That includes stringent compliance standards across our operations, energy efficiency measures in all end-user sectors and ramping up our creative development efforts to develop new and leading technologies. As we seek to be aligned with the Kingdom’s efforts to achieve sustainable development, the ultimate objective of our efforts today is driven by the need to create a sustainable future for our current and future generations.” According to a recent study published in the journal Science, which analysed emissions from nearly 9000 actively-producing oil fields in 90 countries, Saudi Arabia's crude oil production has one of the lowest carbon emissions per barrel globally.

The low carbon intensity advantage of Saudi Arabian crude oil is a result of multiple factors, including the company’s continuous implementation of best-in-class reservoir management practices, flare minimisation, GHG management, and methane leak detection and repair (LDAR). The LDAR programme has been implemented Kingdom-wide across all company operations and is now being optimised by assessing and introducing new cost-effective methane-monitoring technologies, such as thermal cameras, laser detection, and quantification sensors.

Read the article online at: https://www.hydrocarbonengineering.com/the-environment/26092018/saudi-aramco-reinforces-its-commitment-to-reduce-climate-change-causing-greenhouse-gas-emissions-at-annual-oil-and-gas-climate-initiative-ogci-meeting/