Integration of Impacts on Water, Air, Land, and Cost towards Sustainable Petroleum Oil Production in Alberta, Canada

This paper intends to develop quantitative indicators for comparative sustainability assessment of petroleum oil pathways in the province of Alberta, Canada. Eighteen pathways of oil production were developed in this study, and the sustainability indicators were assigned for each pathway to cover greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, water demand, and land use in addition to the cost of supply. The developed sustainability indicators were aligned per functional unit and covered the full life cycle of petroleum oil production. The developed GHG emissions, cost of supply, and land use indicators are found in the range 17.50–226.20 kg of CO2 eq./bbl, 12.28–53.53 USD/bbl, and 0.06–0.178 m2/bbl, respectively. Four scenarios were comparatively conducted and assessed against the business-as-usual scenario within the period horizon 2009–2030. The cost-effective scenario was optimized with the objective function to minimize the cost of supply based on the constraints derived from the business-as-usual scenario. Sustainable scenarios were conducted with the lowest possible impacts on natural resources, GHG emissions, and the cost of supply accompanied by specific assumptions for petroleum oil production from different pathways in Alberta. The average annual savings on water demand and land area were found to be 67 and 30%, respectively, due to the shifting of upgrader feedstock from surface mining to the in-situ steam-assisted gravity drainage (SAGD) pathway. The corresponding increases due to this shifting in upgrader feedstock were found to be 40 and 3% in GHG emissions and cost of supply, respectively.

• Publication year

  2020

• Venue

  Resources

• Publication date

  2020-05-28

• Fields of study

  Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.3390/resources9060062
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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