Decipher Energy aims to help innovate the future of energy and accelerate the transition to a lower carbon world. Nabors Energy Transition Solutions (NETS) portfolio of advanced and automated technologies is purpose-built to improve energy efficiency and reduce emissions of drilling operations.
By combining our technology portfolio with heightened employee awareness and understanding of our environmental stewardship initiatives, Nabors is enabling responsible hydrocarbon production. Our solutions focus on decarbonizing the oilfield in three key areas:
Advisory and Managements Systems: Engine advisory and management solutions allow rigs to run engines at their most efficient levels and reduce the overall amount of emissions generated.
Technology: Technology solutions that reduce fuel consumption and emissions through energy storage and green fuels in an effort to diversify from pure diesel into cleaner fuels.
Automation and Centralization: Utilization and further development of smart drilling automation tools and centralization enables the remote execution of operations, fewer days on well, reduced on-site personnel and increased safety.
The North Sea is a shared body of water between the United Kingdom (UK), Norway, Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, France, and Germany. It’s also home to 184 offshore oil rigs, making it one of the largest offshore drilling areas in the world.
Since the late 1960s, the North Sea region witnessed an oil boom following the Netherlands’ and the United Kingdom’s discovery of oil on their coastlines and out at sea. This oil boom peaked in 1999 at 2.9 million barrels per day in the UK Continental Shelf and in Norway in 2001 at 3.4 million barrels per day.
Although these offshore drilling rigs, otherwise known as the upstream sector of oil and gas, cost more to construct and maintain than land drilling, they produce much more oil per day. These rigs also come at an environmental and economic cost. Offshore drilling not only pollutes the oceans and harms the marine ecosystem, but it also pollutes the air, intensifying the effects on climate change. There is a high risk of both accidental spills as well as the release of oil, chemicals and radioactive materials to the sea through the “routine operation of production platforms” according to the Convention for the Protection of the Marine Environment of the North-East Atlantic (OSPAR).
Between 2000-2011, 4,123 separate spills were recorded in the North Sea, for which only seven oil companies were fined, according to an investigation carried out by The Guardian. Total fines resulted in £74,000 and not a single company paid more than £20,000. By 2014, oil and gas spills were increasing, with the United Kingdom alone reporting a total of 601 spills. A 14.5% increase from 2013.
In 2011, the North Sea saw one of its largest oil spills by Shell due to a leak in a flow line leading to its Gannet Alpha oil platform off of the coast of Scotland. An estimated 200 tons or 1,300 barrels spilled into the surrounding water.
Another spill occurred during 2016 in what BP called a “technical issue,” admitting to a regulatory failure that that led to the discharge of 95 tons of oil within the North Sea. This oil was left in the water to disperse naturally. According to BP, no clean-up of the spill was ever enacted. BP was charged only £7000 in fines.
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