For safety and environmental reasons, it is necessary to add chemicals during the oil and gas production process. We have significantly reduced environmentally harmful discharges.
For safety reasons, it is necessary to add chemicals during the oil and gas production process. The well flow consists of a mixture of oil, gas and water. The mixture comes at different pressures and temperatures, and it can vary a lot from well to well.
It is difficult to anticipate the well flow exactly, and the production platforms are therefore designed to tackle large variations. To compensate for some of the variations, chemicals are added in order to ensure safe production.
Dissolved gas will be released in an uncontrolled fashion during the production process unless anti-foam chemicals are added. This is necessary in several places, to avoid problems in the production process and to prevent discharges of oil into the sea.
On other platforms, the oil droplets in the produced water are too small for proper cleaning unless flocculants are added. Flocculants help the tiny droplets to merge into larger droplets, which are easier to remove from the water before it is discharged into the sea. Thus, less oil is discharged into the sea compared with a situation in which chemicals are not used.
There are many examples that show that the use of chemicals in production is necessary and beneficial in terms of safety and the environment.
Different chemicals have different impacts on the environment. We work continuously to reduce the environmental risk. For chemicals, this can be achieved by minimising the volume or, even better, by substituting the most harmful chemicals with those that have less environmental impact.
Since the start of the "zero discharge" efforts on the Norwegian continental shelf (in 2000), we have reduced the environmental risk from added chemicals by more than 80 per cent. The Norwegian Pollution Control Authority (SFT) agree that the goal of zero discharges of added chemicals has been achieved.
However, there are still some chemicals that are not possible to substitute for safety reasons. Together with our suppliers of chemicals, we are continuously endeavouring to find replacements for those chemicals. Our final goal is to phase out or substitute all chemicals that represent an environmental risk.
