BP has issued ”BP Technology Outlook” Report to show how technology can play a major role in meeting future energy challenges by widening energy resource choices, transforming the power sector, improving transport efficiency and helping to address climate concerns out to 2050.
The BP Technology Outlook sets out how technological developments could shape and influence the way we identify sources of energy and extract, convert, store and ultimately consume them over the next 35 years.
Since the 18th century, energy has helped to drive human and economic development, a process that continues today. This journey has been largely fuelled by fossil fuels – coal, oil and gas – providing heat, power and mobility for industry and consumers. The past three decades have seen a surge in these trends, driven by demand from emerging economies, led by China and India. However, consuming all of the available fossil fuel resources would create greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions well above the threshold recommended by scientists. For the future, we need energy that is affordable, sustainable and secure.
BP reports examines what technology can do in terms of access to primary energy resources, how it might change both the power and transport sectors, especially in the context of reducing carbon emissions, the impact of natural resource constraints on technological choices, and emerging technologies that have the potential to accelerate or disrupt energy models in the future.
The analysis highlights three key issues:
- Technology has extraordinary potential to increase accessible primary energy resources, both fossil and non-fossil, while reducing their costs. Projected global energy demand at 2050 could be met many times over. The key question for policy makers and businesses becomes one of choice – which resources make sense to pursue given their relative costs and characteristics?
- Digital technologies have more widespread potential than any other technology area to transform energy production, supply and end use. They offer a real opportunity to improve safety and reliability, reduce costs and contribute to more efficient operations.
- Introducing a carbon price would open up a range of potential pathways for energy, with the power sector offering the most compelling options for decarbonization at comparatively low cost. For the transport sector, vehicles are set to become more energy efficient, with liquid fuels likely to continue to dominate the market whilst batteries become more cost competitive.
Emerging technologies
Major energy technology advances have been rare, but when they have occurred they have driven transformation and disrupted markets and business models. The clearest recent example in the oil and gas sector is the development of directional drilling and hydraulic fracturing technologies for producing shale gas and oil. The pace of innovation and therefore potential for such breakthroughs is increasing, facilitated by businesses, universities, governments, specialist research centres and consultancies combining their capabilities.
- Hydrogen infrastructure and storage – widespread availability of hydrogen for the consumer
- Data analytics – creating value from vast data sets
- Automation via robotics – enabling safe and reliable operations
- Solar conversion – breaking through the 30%-efficiency barrier using low-cost fabrication methods and biotechnology to drive agriculture
- Beyond silicon computing – ultra-fast, high-efficiency computing utilizing next generation materials and approaches
- Better batteries for vehicles – enhancing the growth of vehicle electrification and reducing emissions
- 3D printing – bespoke custom components in high-value applications
- Fuel cells – modular approach to power generation
Digital technologies – such as data analytics and automation enabled by supercomputing – have the greatest potential to drive far-reaching change.
The nature of certain technologies in areas such as digital systems, bioscience and nanoscience confers on them great disruptive potential. In the shorter term, digital technologies – such as data analytics and automation enabled by supercomputing – have the greatest potential to drive far-reaching change, offering multiple opportunities to make energy supply and consumption safer, more reliable, and more cost-effective. It is perhaps difficult for us to imagine their potential in the longer term, when, for example, some expect machines to overtake humans in intelligence.
Developments in advanced materials could lead to extraordinary improvements in the performance of batteries, solar conversion and the use of hydrogen as a fuel. However, these developments could still take decades to be applied globally due to the huge amounts of capital required.
Technology helps keep oil and gas resources plentiful
Applying today’s best available technologies to discovered oil and gas resources could significantly increase ‘reserves’ from 2.9 trillion barrels of oil equivalent to 4.8 trillion barrels
The most significant change to resource opportunities over the past 10 years has been the advent of production from shale and tight rock – this has more than doubled total potentially accessible oil and gas in discovered reservoirs. Other key technology levers include enhanced oil recovery – the biggest contributor to increasing recoverable oil volumes – subsurface imaging, and operational improvement through the use of digital technologies, such as sensors, robotics and supercomputers for data analysis.
Future technology advances and new discoveries could add a further 2.7 trillion technically recoverable barrels of oil equivalent through to 2050. Given that nations are increasingly seeking to limit carbon emissions by using less energy and shifting towards lower carbon fuels, it is unlikely that all these resources will be required.
Learn more by reading BP Technology Outlook
Earlier this year, BP issued a report on Energy Outlook to focus on long-term energy tre
nds up to 2035. Learn more here.
Source & Image Credits: BP
In the beginning, I was straightforward with you propecia before and after has changed my existence. It has become much more fun, and now I have to run. Just as it is improbable to sit.
