POWER August 2020 - 14

GLOBAL MONITOR
4. Wärtsilä and Pivot Power are installing 100
MW of energy storage for the UK electricity
market, installations that will provide essential
capacity for rapid electric vehicle charging.
The 50-MW installations, in Oxford (shown
here) and Kent, are scheduled to be completed
by year-end. Courtesy: Pivot Power
better operational performance, maintaining
SOC [state of charge] and overall health
of the assets to protect the valuable income
streams generated by the project. "
Michael Rossman, co-founder of EnergyBillKill.com,
a group that offers business
energy switching services for renewable
and traditional energy, told POWER that
" Energy storage in the UK has two great
promises. First, for the national grid and
management of electricity at peak and at
a low-use level. Second, and potentially
even more powerful, is home storage.
The first is being led by ... innovators like
Wärtsilä and EDF, " with Rossman noting
the two 50-MW storage projects in Oxford
and Kent. He said the potential for homebased
storage " is very exciting because
it will empower homes [and commercial
offices] to be completely energy independent
from the central grid. The magic is in
the ability to store solar or wind energy
'while you were out.' At the moment, if
the energy is not sold into the grid, it is effectively
wasted. In the near future, homes
and offices will be able to store this energy
in either batteries or alternative forms such
as water. An example of this is Tesla's Powerwall.
Interestingly, the developing world
leads energy storage adoption in homes.
This is due to regular power interruptions
and uncertainty of supply. The future is
bright. The future is storage. "
-Darrell Proctor is associate editor
for POWER.
Oil and Gas Field Operations
Increasingly Reliant on
Renewable Power
More oil and gas companies are ditching
diesel and natural gas generation for
renewables to power field operations, a
new study from IHS Markit suggests. The
market research company says it has so
far tallied 45 announced projects at new
development and existing assets in its Oil
14
and Gas Field-based Renewable Energy
database. While only 14 announcements
were made before 2018, 13 were made
in 2018, and 15 were announced in 2019.
While the analysis suggests that activity
in the energy-intensive production sector
is still in the " early adopter stage, " it
is still a " dynamic and important trend to
follow, " said Judson Jacobs, managing director
at IHS Markit's Upstream division.
Jacobs said the group, which studies
oil and gas technology, began tracking
the announcements as part of work
related to greenhouse gas emissions
management. " So, we said let's actually
collect all these and go through them to
see if we see a trend, " he said. " And we
plotted it up and it was pretty dramatic in
terms of growth. It was [one or two] projects
through 2017, and then all of sudden
a dramatic rise in 2018 and 2019. "
Among key insights IHS Markit shared
with its clientele is that projects range in
size from 2 MW to 300 MW. Solar is the
most prominent renewable technology,
followed by hydropower and wind. But
the analysis also shows that companies
are mainly exploring three ways of procuring
renewable power. " One, which is just
straightforward renewables, where they'll
construct a renewable installation adjacent
to the oil and gas asset, " Jacobs said. Another
is power from the grid, and that's
especially prevalent in regions where renewables
make up the bulk of power fed
into the grid, such as in Norway, which is a
major hydropower producer. Finally, pointing
to a " dynamic commercial market " for
renewables, several prominent oil and gas
companies are exploring virtual power purchase
agreements (VPPA).
Compared to a physical PPA, which
places the responsibility for monetizing
and selling the electrons produced by a
renewable project on the buyer, a VPPA
is merely a financial transaction in which
a corporate buyer exchanges a fixed-price
cash flow for a variable-priced cash flow
and renewable energy certificates. As
Rachit Kansal, a senior associate at the
Rocky Mountain Institute explained, the
VPPA structure has gained traction in
recent years because it allows smaller
buyers and companies without energy
trading expertise to participate in energy
markets. " The VPPA has enabled many
companies to make quick and significant
progress toward ambitious renewable energy
goals, " he said. One reason is that
" VPPAs are easily scalable and enable
buyers to satisfy a large portion of their
sustainability goals with a relatively small
number of deals, " he said.
www.powermag.com
A prominent example of a VPPA is oil
major ExxonMobil's 2018 multi-year supply
contract with Danish renewable firm
Ørsted for 500 MW split evenly between
wind and solar to power ExxonMobil's
Permian operations. Ørsted commissioned
the 338-MW Sage Draw Wind
project in Texas affiliated with that agreement
this April, and the remaining 250
MW will come from the 350-MW Permian
solar photovoltaic complex, which is
slated to begin operations in mid-2021.
IHS Markit's analysis also revealed
several drivers for the emerging trend.
" Stakeholder pressure to reduce emissions
is a factor, " Jacobs said. " It is also
about steeply declining costs for renewables
and the industry's growing familiarity
and experience with these technologies.
And there are tangible improvements to
operational performance that go along
with using them. " Jacobs, notably, pointed
to reliability as a driving factor. Power at
oil and gas field facilities is used for a lot
of things, such as pumping, processing,
transporting, compressing, or just keeping
the lights on. " All these things are pretty
power intense, " he said.
Santos, a leading independent oil and
gas producer in the Asia-Pacific region,
for example, is exploring outfitting more
than 200 wells distributed across 130,000
square kilometers (km) in remote South
Australia and Queensland with a series of
off-grid solar and battery systems. So far,
it has rolled out the renewables systems
(Figure 5) at 22 wells in 2019, and 34 in
2020-a total of 3.2 MW-at a cost of
$11 million. As part of its strategy, Santos
has also established a standard design for
the solar and battery system, and it has
said the benefits are already tangible.
Santos pursued the option to cut down
on three to four visits per well per month,
owing to repeated downtime events related
to diesel-powered beam pump system
issues at the wells. " What they've seen
is that since they put in the solar battery
installations, their uptime is 99.9%, and
they're not driving out there and exposing
their personnel to safety [hazards], they're
saving on GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions
from driving, and their maintenance
costs are lower as well, " Jacobs said. Electrification
is also a driving factor. " Drawing
renewable-generated power direct from
the grid, as to offshore platforms in Norway,
removes most energy generation
equipment entirely, enabling fewer on-site
personnel needed to operate it and smaller
facility footprints, " he said. Another benefit
companies highlight is the elimination of
fuel deliveries to site, he said.
POWER | August 2020
http://www.gyBillKill.com http://www.powermag.com
POWER August 2020

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