Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Oil, Gas, and Energy
Beyond Hard-to-Abate: Matching Models to Transition Bottlenecks
Published: 2026-09-09
Subjects: Chemical Engineering, Computational Engineering, Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing, Oil, Gas, and Energy
In energy-intensive industry, the difficulty of decarbonising is not a uniform property of the emissions involved but a property of the pathway, conditional on identifiable bottlenecks at three interlocking levels. At the process level, heterogeneous products and coupled processes multiply the low-carbon option space. At the firm level, financing premiums and coordination failures across the [...]
Estimating CO2 Leakage Fluxes along Legacy Wells Using a Rapid Physics-Based Screening Approach
Published: 2026-09-02
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Engineering, Geology, Oil, Gas, and Energy, Petroleum Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Achieving net-zero targets demands the rapid expansion of CO2 geological storage, but legacy wells in mature petroleum provinces represent a significant containment risk when engineered barriers degrade. At the early assessment stage, storage projects need to rapidly bound plausible leakage magnitudes across large legacy-well inventories when integrity data are sparse; however, suitable modelling [...]
Global limits on CO2 geological storage deployment using a coupled industry growth - pressure constrained model
Published: 2026-08-31
Subjects: Geology, Oil, Gas, and Energy, Other Civil and Environmental Engineering
Geological storage of CO2 at scale is critical to meeting climate objectives, yet deployment targets often rely on top-down climate pathways that overlook the coupled constraints of subsurface pressure buildup and realistic industry drilling rates. Here we map global limits on CO2 storage deployment using CO2LOGIX 2.0, an improved model coupling subsurface pressure evolution with country-level [...]
Contrasting oil and gas methane emission intensities across Algeria's major production basins derived using MethaneSAT data
Published: 2026-08-28
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Oil, Gas, and Energy
Algeria, Africa's largest natural gas producer and a major European Union gas supplier, has limited basin-scale assessment of oil and gas methane emissions. Here, we use MethaneSAT observations from September 2024 to May 2025 to quantify methane emissions across three Algerian production regions representing 73% of national onshore production. Total methane emissions are 18 t h⁻¹ [11–25] in Hassi [...]
Mineral stability and porosity dynamics in Halite- and Kainite-bearing rocks after hydrogen batch reaction test: a case study of Realmonte mine, Sicily (Italy)
Published: 2026-08-21
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geochemistry, Geology, Mineral Physics, Mining Engineering, Oil, Gas, and Energy, Risk Analysis, Stratigraphy, Sustainability
Underground hydrogen storage in salt caverns is among the most mature geological storage options, yet the behaviour of potash-salt lithologies under hydrogen exposure remains entirely uncharacterised. This study presents a multi-technique characterisation, performed on selected representative samples, of Messinian halite and kainite-bearing evaporites from the Realmonte mine (Sicily) subjected to [...]
Methane emissions intensity mapping from space reveals outsized emissions impact from marginal oil and gas production in the U.S.
Published: 2026-08-09
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Oil, Gas, and Energy
Methane emissions reduction from the oil/gas sector, the largest industrial methane source, is a widely-recognized effective strategy for slowing the rate of climate warming. There are over 600,000 well-pads in the U.S.; one-fifth produce most of the economic value, while the remainder produce limited oil/gas. We use high-resolution MethaneSAT satellite data covering >80% of US onshore [...]
Multi-scale measurements and temporally resolved modeling of methane emissions at natural gas distribution stations
Published: 2026-07-03
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Oil, Gas, and Energy
Methane (CH4) emissions from natural gas distribution stations are not well characterized by measurements, contributing to uncertainty in urban emissions inventories and mitigation strategies. We conducted a multi-scale, multi-temporal study of four distribution stations in Calgary, Alberta, combining component- and facility-level measurements with modeling to quantify, attribute, and compare [...]
Challenges with Developing a Measurement-Based Basin Methane Intensity Estimate: A Case Study from the Haynesville
Published: 2026-05-01
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Oil, Gas, and Energy
Methane intensity, the emissions relative to production, has been a focus in global regulations on oil and gas production and imports, given the climate benefits of methane emission reductions. Methodological frameworks to create annual measurement-based emissions inventory estimates and calculate methane intensity using snapshot measurements have been developed. However, there are still multiple [...]
Geological controls on Underground Hydrogen Storage in depleted gas fields
Published: 2026-03-27
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Geology, Oil, Gas, and Energy, Other Civil and Environmental Engineering, Sustainability
The geological storage of hydrogen is an alternative for large-scale energy storage in support of expanding renewable energy systems. The North Sea has hundreds of depleted gas fields that are potential storage sites. Robust screening procedures are necessary to select the most suitable reservoirs in terms of geology. This study investigates the geological controls on hydrogen storage in depleted [...]
Coordinated satellite, aircraft, and ground-based observations of a large transient methane release
Published: 2026-02-02
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Oil, Gas, and Energy
We present the results of a Very Large Methane Release (VLMR) experiment evaluating methane retrievals from the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES) Advanced Baseline Imagers (ABIs) and multiple low-Earth-orbit satellite instruments with high point-source detection thresholds. The experiment coordinated observations of a U.S. gas pipeline blowdown with nine satellites, an [...]
What Companies Say vs. What Matters: LLM Analysis of Biodiversity Disclosures in Oil and Gas
Published: 2026-02-01
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Biodiversity, Oil, Gas, and Energy, Sustainability
The power system ecosystem encompasses infrastructure intensive industries such as electric utilities, hydropower operators, oil and gas producers, and mining companies supplying critical minerals. These industries share a common challenge: their physical assets interact extensively with natural ecosystems, creating dependencies and impacts that increasingly draw investor and stakeholder [...]
High-resolution seismic reservoir monitoring with multitask and transfer learning
Published: 2026-01-03
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Computational Engineering, Geophysics and Seismology, Oil, Gas, and Energy, Sustainability
High-resolution real-time monitoring of reservoir changes is essential during CO2 injection or hydrocarbon production. Here, we leverage convolutional neural networks (CNNs) that employ multitask (MTL) and transfer (TL) learning to accurately predict relevant reservoir parameters from time-lapse seismic data. CNNs are initially trained to estimate the P-wave velocity from 2D multicomponent [...]
Joint Rock Physics Inversion and Basin Modeling for Comprehensive Source Rock Characterization
Published: 2025-12-16
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geology, Geophysics and Seismology, Oil, Gas, and Energy, Sedimentology, Stratigraphy
This study presents an integrated workflow that combines statistical rock physics inversion with Monte Carlo basin modeling to comprehensively quantify source rock properties and their uncertainties. First, well-log and seismically-derived elastic properties are used in a statistical rock physics inversion to estimate porosity, kerogen content, and mineral fractions. These posterior distributions [...]
Access to Monitoring Data Reduces Methane Intensity at Operational Oil and Gas Facilities
Published: 2025-11-21
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Oil, Gas, and Energy
Methane intensity is defined as methane gas emitted to the atmosphere per oil and gas product throughput at various steps in the supply chain. It is the standard metric used by industry stakeholders to assess methane emissions performance. Many studies have assessed the capabilities of methane emission measurement systems, but no studies have quantified the effect on methane intensity of oil and [...]
Quantification Error Model for Aerial LiDAR Methane Emission Rate Estimates
Published: 2025-11-12
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Environmental Monitoring, Oil, Gas, and Energy, Statistical Models
Accurate characterization of methane emission rate quantification error (QE) is essential for building measurement-based emissions inventories that benchmark emissions, guide mitigation, and satisfy reporting frameworks such as OGMP 2.0. Previous studies have summarized QE using distributions of errors from controlled release experiments, but with limited consideration of environmental conditions [...]