Abstract

Introduction: The oil and gas sector is the subject of key interest and concern because of its increasing demand, the dependency of various sectors on it and its high environmental impacts. The life cycle assessment of this sector will give us the idea to enumerate the various emissions, energy use, fuel usage, raw material requirement, resource consumption, material requirement related to each life cycle stages. Based on the literature analysis, we have presented some discussions on recent trends in the oil and gas sector, cleaner technologies and propose future research directions.
Methodology: A detailed literature review was done by identifying the research papers focusing on the LCA in oil and gas sector. The database referred were EBSCOhost, Science Direct, Google Scholar, Web of science. The literature search is limited to academic search from 1990 to 2018.
Findings: In India despite a regulatory lid on polluting fuels, the overall fuel demand showed a healthy trend in 2017-18 on the back of strong growth in transportation fuels. The total consumption of petrol was increased from 10.14 percent to 26.17 MT, while diesel consumption grew by 6.63 percent to 81 MT in 2018. Various studies have confirmed that the main environment polluting hotspot identified in the supply chain was the refining activity, the maximum CO₂ emissions is from the exploration and drilling stage i.e., 60%-65% and the local pollutant emission is maximum in the oil usage phase which is approx. SOx emissions is 5.45 MT, NOx is 6.88 MT and black carbon 8.5 MT.
Contributions: The results can be used in the comparative assessment of different crudes, by the government and the industry for decision making, by the various stakeholders and researchers who are conducting LCA and proposing models for systems that are using the petrochemical products in different context.

Keywords: Life cycle assessment; Life cycle models; Emissions; Environmental impacts; Energy balance; Sustainable; Impact categories