Thirteenth International Conference on Climate Change: Impacts & Responses

Abstract

The most abundant material on our planet, seawater, could help us to accelerate the transition to human-timescale renewable energy resources by using stranded oil and gas infrastructure. When seawater unlocks potential clean offshore energy storage hubs, offshore petroleum platforms become part of a giant redox flow battery network. The offshore oil industry activities created useful scientific knowledge, operational know-how and infrastructure. Once offshore petroleum reservoirs reach their economic limit, the corresponding infrastructure becomes stranded. Removing it is costly and any opportunity to continue capitalizing the operational know-how and the developed job market is lost. The type of platforms that are left behind when oil extraction ceases are well equipped to easily re-engineering their purpose. This study suggests repurposing stranded oil platforms into a network of redox flow batteries. Each battery will have the following three main components: below-seabed reservoirs as the electrodes, stored tuned seawater as electrolyte, and redox cells setup on top of the oil platforms to provide the ion bridges in a set of parallel and series cells to optimize current and voltage to the available sources, respectively. We present a framework for a sustainable business model based on the fulfillment of the operational and return-on-investment requirements by key stakeholders therefore addressing a key pain point of the climate crisis: energy storage.