Environmental Benefits of Advanced Oil & Gas Exploration

This online course is part of our Oil & Gas course category and provides information on environmental benefits of advanced oil and gas exploration and production technology.

Throughout the oil and gas life cycle, the industry has applied an array of advanced technologies to improve efficiency, productivity, and environmental performance. This course focuses specifically on advances in exploration and production operations.

Thanks to advances in exploration and production technology, today’s industry is better equipped than ever to find and produce valuable oil and gas—even as these resources become concentrated in deeper, more remote, and more technically challenging areas. Many of the same advances also support our goals for environmental protection. With each step up in performance and efficiency, the industry can recover more resources with fewer wells drilled, resulting in smaller volumes of cuttings, drilling muds and fluids, and produced waters. Technologies such as slimhole, directional, and multilateral drilling reduce the footprint of drilling rigs and minimize surface impacts. Other benefits of advanced technology include reduced energy consumption, reduced noise from operations, decreased visibility of facilities, reduced emissions of greenhouse gases and hazardous air pollutants, better protection of water resources, preservation of habitats and wildlife, and enhanced worker safety.

This course is intended for use by petroleum, chemical, industrial, mechanical and civil engineers, construction professionals and others interested in learning about the environmental benefits of advanced oil and gas exploration and production technology.

Learning Objectives

Upon completion of this course, you will:

• Understand and explain advanced exploration technologies and their environmental benefits
• Understand and explain how modern advanced technology results in drilling and completion of fewer wells, less waste and less surface disturbance
• Understand and explain how with advanced reservoir management and other production technologies, producers recover more resources from oil and gas operations, while minimizing produced water and other wastes
• Understand and explain how on land and offshore oil and gas producers have developed innovative ways to restore sites to original, and sometimes better than original condition, for diverse uses ranging from housing to agriculture and wildlife habitat
• Learn how to operate in sensitive environments – host of advanced technologies enable the oil and gas industry to produce resources far beneath sensitive environments