Diesel and Emissions Tracking in Real Time: Moving Towards Sustainable Fracturing

Every organization in the oil and gas industry is currently focused on optimizing hydrocarbon production using innovative technologies and infrastructure to meet environmental stewardship goals. This study details a methodology to enable real-time tracking of diesel consumption during the hydraulic fracturing treatment. Diesel volumetrics can then be easily upscaled to CO2 equivalent emissions with the correct knowledge of the emission factor. A digital dashboard is built that can stream the data with cloud or on-prem services. In the asset performance monitoring, all engine parameters such as rotations per minute (RPM) of each piece of equipment are recorded; fuel efficiency factors convert these data to the equivalent diesel totalizer. An idle time will be also recorded when the RPM is recorded outside the application's range and will be used to optimize the idle run. An effective methodology is presented to calibrate the fuel efficiency factors utilizing actual diesel measurements. The entire dataset recorded is uploaded into the operator's cloud structure. The results of on-the-fly calculations and comparisons of the performance of the assets are displayed on a dashboard with the actual diesel. Our focus in this work is on five components of emissions in hydraulic fracturing: high-pressure pumps, blender, hydration unit, and transportation of water and proppant. However, for other purposes, the dashboard and digital architecture can be expanded across the entire process from supply chain to post-treatment activities. This methodology will enable the operators to conduct route planning and minimize diesel consumption across all activities. It provides the decision maker with real-time information on the instantaneous emissions footprint, unlike the current measurement that relies on postmortem calculation. It also provides the analysis of operations, logistics, methods, and material efficiency impact on emissions.