Australia's upstream oil and gas industry has been slow to carry out Energy Efficiency Opportunities program assessments, even though it has much more scope to cut energy use than other parts of the mining industry, a new report shows.
A detailed snapshot of mining industry data, released by the EEO program, shows that upstream oil and gas companies have identified cost-effective energy savings that equate to 11.9% of their total energy use.
Yet less than half their total energy use (42.6%) has so far been scrutinised under the scheme for efficiency opportunities.
The identified energy savings constitute a massive 28% of the energy use that the upstream oil and gas industry has so far assessed.
In contrast, metal ore miners have identified savings equivalent to only 3.2% of their total energy use (equivalent to 5.3% of energy they have so far assessed).
Coal miners have identified savings equivalent to 2.2% of their total energy use (equivalent to 3% of energy they have so far assessed).
The coal mining and metal ore mining sectors have also made much more progress in scrutinising their energy use under the scheme – with the coal mining sector having assessed 73.4% of its energy use and metal ore mining having assessed 78.3%.
Value of upstream oil and gas energy savings 'confidential'
The report declines to quantify the potential financial savings available to the upstream oil and gas, even though it provides some financial data for coal and metal ore mining.
The report says metal ore miners that provided non-commercially confidential information on the value of savings estimated they were worth a combined $77.2 million a year.
Coal miners providing information on the value of savings estimated they were worth $56.2 million a year.
But the report does not disclose any information on the value of potential savings to the upstream oil and gas sector "to maintain confidentiality of commercially sensitive information".
The upstream oil and gas industry does lead other parts of the mining industry in one respect – its commitment to implement identified measures.
The report says the sector will adopt 83% of the measures with a shorter-term payback (under two years), higher than the adoption rates for coal mining (65%) and metal ore mining (58%).
It will adopt 53% of the measures with a payback of two to four years, compared to an adoption rate of 31% in the coal mining sector and 52% in metal ore mining.
The report is based on data from 232 mining businesses that accounted for 18% of total energy use for the EEO program and 70% of the energy end-use for the mining industry.
The businesses consumed 314.5 petajoules of energy in 2007-08 and in total reported opportunities that could save 17.2PJ a year, representing 25% of total identified EEO program savings.
If implemented, the mining industry savings would equate to CO2e reductions of 1.4 million tonnes a year.
