Search Results (259)

Seismic monitoring networks increasingly develop capabilities that function as geographic information infrastructure, transforming continuous geophysical observations into spatial information that supports research, decision-making, and public awareness. In Texas, seismicity linked to oil and gas operations has increased since 2009 across major producing regions, prompting the Texas Legislature to establish the Texas Seismological Network and Seismology Research program (TexNet) in 2015. This paper examines TexNet’s seismic monitoring network, field operations, data-processing pipeline, and the information products, data services, and decision-support tools that transform seismic observations into accessible earthquake information. Since routine earthquake reporting began in 2017, TexNet has grown from an inherited network of eighteen broadband stations to a system directly maintaining 207 stations and incorporating 421 active stations to locate earthquakes across Texas. TexNet provides a suite of information products, data services, and decision-support tools—including the TexNet Earthquake Catalog, near-real-time notification systems, and open data products—that connect geophysical observations with the needs of researchers, regulatory agencies, industry, and the public. TexNet remains fundamentally a seismic monitoring network, with additional capabilities that support scientific, regulatory, and public information needs in Texas and other regions with induced seismicity. Full article

In this review, I synthesize recent evidence showing how climate acceleration, biosphere disruption, food and freshwater insecurity, pollution, disease, and inequality are increasingly converging into a single, interconnected sustainability challenge. I show that the Anthropocene crisis extends far beyond climate warming and its impacts alone: current national commitments remain consistent with warming of approximately 2.3–2.5 °C under full implementation, while current policies could produce up to 2.8 °C; however, the remaining carbon budget for a 50% chance of limiting warming to 1.5 °C may be exhausted within only a few years, and the oil and gas industry has committed to a 14% increase in upstream production over the period 2024–2030. At the same time, pollution remains responsible for approximately nine million deaths annually; agriculture accounts for roughly 70% of global freshwater withdrawals; and groundwater depletion, continental drying, marine heatwaves, weakening carbon sinks, and intensifying precipitation extremes are destabilizing the ecological and hydrological systems that sustain human health and food security. This review’s incremental contribution is the integration of these trends within a justice-centered sustainability framework that links Earth-system feedback, public health burdens, water insecurity, and institutional failure rather than treating them as separate environmental problems. I argue that because vulnerability is produced not by exposure alone but by unequal access to infrastructure, wealth, governance capacity, and political power, a viable response therefore requires more than decarbonization: it demands ecological restoration, food and water-centered governance, pollution and disease mitigation, and justice-based institutional reform capable of sustaining human dignity, equity, and resilience within planetary boundaries. I encourage resilience and sustainability programs around the world to fold in these additional challenges to their missions and goals. Full article

Western Kazakhstan is one of the most climate-vulnerable macro-regions in Central Asia. Intensifying aridification, acute water scarcity, and active land degradation are already undermining its ecosystems and an economy built heavily on oil and gas. Yet investment in the region is still driven by short-term priorities rather than a systematic assessment of actual need. A previous study by the authors identified a significant investment gap for sustainable development in the Aktobe region, and showed that this problem calls for comprehensive, comparative analyses rather than a localized one. This study aims to assess and compare investment needs for sustainable development across the four regions of Western Kazakhstan (Aktobe Atyrau, West Kazakhstan, and Mangystau) for 2021–2024, accounting for sustainability thresholds derived from optimal population density. An improved eco-economic methodology was applied, combining per capita investment need calculations with thresholds indicators of regional vulnerability and adaptive capacity, based on official statistical and sectoral data. The results revealed substantial inter-regional differences in investment needs, driven by differing economic specializations, and pointed to an urgent need for targeted investment in water infrastructure modernization, land degradation prevention, and renewable energy development. A new development paradigm is proposed that integrates sustainability thresholds into investment planning, with region-specific recommendations, offering a reproducible framework for arid regions worldwide. The study’s limitations include its short data coverage period (2021–2024), its reliance on official statistics, and the indirect nature of the population-density threshold. The proposed framework was tested for the hydrocarbon-dependent arid regions of Western Kazakhstan. Full article

European energy markets have experienced significant instability as a result of consecutive global systemic shocks, particularly the COVID-19 pandemic and the geopolitical conflict in Ukraine. This paper analyses the development of crude oil and natural gas prices between 2019 and 2024 and discusses their implications for sustainable logistics, energy security and supply chain resilience in Europe. The study is based on secondary data from internationally recognized sources, including the International Energy Agency, OPEC, Eurostat, the European Council, the World Bank and the U.S. Energy Information Administration. An event-based comparative approach supported by descriptive price-change calculations was applied to distinguish between the pandemic-related demand shock and the geopolitical supply-side shock after 2022. The results show that crude oil prices declined from approximately 64 USD/barrel in 2019 to 41 USD/barrel in 2020, representing a decrease of about 3f5.9%, mainly in connection with reduced mobility, lower transport activity and industrial slowdown during the COVID-19 pandemic. In contrast, crude oil prices increased to approximately 100 USD/barrel in 2022, representing an increase of about 143.9% compared to 2020, coinciding with geopolitical uncertainty and supply-side pressures. The European natural gas market appeared particularly vulnerable to the 2022 crisis because of supplier dependence, pipeline infrastructure constraints and reduced Russian gas flows. EU natural gas demand declined by 55 billion m³, or 13%, in 2022, indicating the effect of high prices, energy savings and crisis adaptation. The findings suggest that crude oil shocks are mainly related to transport costs and freight rates, while natural gas shocks may influence energy-intensive production, warehousing, cold chains and broader supply chain stability. The study highlights the need for energy diversification, renewable and low-carbon energy development, energy efficiency and more resilient logistics strategies. Full article

Digital Twin (DT) technology has emerged as a transformative approach in pipeline engineering, enabling real-time monitoring, predictive analytics, and enhanced decision-making across the asset lifecycle. This review critically examines recent advancements in the application of digital twins for pipeline systems, with a particular focus on condition monitoring, leak detection, corrosion assessment, and predictive maintenance. The study synthesizes findings from a wide range of literature to identify key enabling technologies, including Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, data-driven modeling, computational fluid dynamics (CFD), and machine learning algorithms. Special attention is given to the integration of physics-based and data-driven models for improving the accuracy and reliability of digital twin frameworks. In addition, this paper proposes a unified reference architecture for pipeline digital twins, supported by a mathematical formulation of synchronization and a comparative synthesis of existing approaches. The review highlights how digital twins facilitate early fault detection and operational optimization by continuously synchronizing physical assets with their virtual counterparts. The review also emphasizes the importance of uncertainty-aware and reliability-informed digital twin frameworks for robust decision-making in safety-critical pipeline applications. Applications in subsea, oil and gas, and water distribution pipelines are explored, demonstrating the versatility of DT systems under different environmental and operational conditions. Despite significant progress, challenges remain in data integration, model validation, scalability, and cybersecurity. Furthermore, the lack of standardized architectures and interoperability frameworks limits widespread adoption. This paper concludes by outlining future research directions, including the development of hybrid modeling techniques, edge computing integration, and AI-driven autonomous decision systems. Overall, digital twin technology represents a paradigm shift in pipeline engineering, offering substantial potential to enhance safety, efficiency, and sustainability in complex infrastructure systems. Full article

Oil and gas pipelines are the core infrastructure of energy transportation, and their safe operation is crucial to national energy security. Aiming at the difficulty of feature extraction and insufficient diagnosis accuracy of pipeline acoustic fault, a fault diagnosis method based on dual-branch parallel feature fusion of the original time-series signal and time–frequency map was proposed. In this method, the time–frequency map of the one-dimensional acoustic signal was generated by continuous wavelet Transform (CWT), and the original signal was input into the dual-branch network, respectively. The spatial–frequency domain features were extracted by using lightweight depthwise separable convolution (LDconv) embedded with coordinate attention (CA) in the upper branch. The lower branch mines local details and temporal dependencies through deformable convolution v4 (DCNv4) and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU). The dual-branch features were concatenated and fused by Global Average Pooling (GAP), and finally the classification results were output by the fully connected network and Softmax. Experiments on industrial field data show that the average diagnostic accuracy of the proposed method is 98.87%, which can effectively extract weak fault features under complex noise, and has significant advantages in early fault recognition and generalization performance. Full article

Ukraine’s energy strategy under martial law necessitates decentralized local energy systems to counter electricity shortages and systemic infrastructure failures. The study develops and validates an optimization model for designing the architecture of decentralized “energy islands” based on circular bioenergy models for agricultural waste use. Empirical verification was conducted using data from the Vinnytsia region in Ukraine. The model accounts for a multi-level structure that separates micro/small generation (0.1–2.0 MW) from medium generation (1–20 MW) based on the logistical radius for raw material collection. The model incorporated the Value of Lost Load (VLL), enabling the monetization of avoided socio-economic losses from energy shortages. In addition, the coefficient of energy island sustainability (I_sred) was introduced to quantitatively assess the effectiveness of investments in terms of replacing external resources. The modeling revealed the nonlinear nature of the total cost function, enabling us to determine an optimal energy-autonomy range of 40% to 50% for communities. At this threshold, the total construction and logistics costs are minimized. The potential socio-economic losses from blackouts are effectively mitigated, as confirmed by the calculated sustainability coefficient (I_sred), which ranges from 0.78 to 0.94 across the studied communities. The resource potential assessment confirms that the region’s total potential is approaching 30 million tons of oil equivalent, driven by solid biofuels, agricultural residues, and energy crops (miscanthus, switchgrass). The classification of biomass supply chains shows that exceeding the transportation radius by more than 70 km at the meso level, or deviating from the optimal logistics lever by 20%, reduces the profitability of projects below the critical limit of 15%, which justifies strict localization within raw-material clusters. This enables local communities to eliminate natural gas consumption, reduce energy supply operating costs by 15%, and ensure the autonomous and stable operation of critical infrastructure facilities during prolonged disruptions to the national power grid. Full article

The decarbonization of essential water supply infrastructure is a critical challenge for water-stressed and geographically constrained regions, particularly islands where both water and electricity systems are highly dependent on external or fossil-based resources. In Northern Cyprus, approximately 70% of domestic water demand is met through imported water via pipeline, while electricity generation relies predominantly on fuel oil, resulting in high greenhouse gas emissions and environmental burden. This study evaluates an integrated renewable energy-based supply system using a medium-scale concentrating solar power (CSP) plant with parabolic trough collectors coupled to thermal desalination. The proposed configuration is assessed as an alternative energy-driven infrastructure option for reducing dependence on imported water and fossil-based electricity. System performance was evaluated by estimating electricity and freshwater production under local climatic conditions, demonstrating that the proposed configuration can meet both the associated electrical energy requirements and domestic water demand in the selected region. A cradle-to-gate life cycle assessment (LCA) was conducted to quantify the environmental impacts of the integrated system and support sustainability-oriented decision-making. The LCA results identify residual fossil-based electricity, phosphoric acid consumption, and brine discharge as the main environmental hotspots. Overall, the findings show that CSP-driven desalination can provide a viable and more sustainable option for integrated energy and water supply in water-scarce coastal regions with high solar potential, highlighting its relevance for renewable energy integration, water-energy nexus planning, and resource-efficient infrastructure development. Full article

Ports and industrial regions increasingly call clean-fuel projects “hubs,” although the market functions behind those projects are often still being developed. In Ulsan, this language has shifted from the Northeast Asian Oil Hub to an oil–gas hub and then to a hydrogen–ammonia vision. This article does not ask whether the infrastructure matters. It asks whether the “hub” label is supported by publicly visible evidence. It develops a public-evidence framework for calibrating claims against evidence and adds a public-label validation layer to sustainability-transition and port-governance analysis. The framework is applied to public documents on Ulsan’s oil, oil–gas, and hydrogen–ammonia projects. The oil-hub narrative began with the use of stockpiling assets and tankage leasing. The North Port later became an oil/LNG terminal through project vehicles, terminal-use agreements, EPC contracts, financing, and commercial operation. These records confirm terminal implementation, not the existence of a trading hub. The South Port is better understood as a low-carbon infrastructure vision, while the April 2026 ammonia-bunkering operation is treated as a port-system fuel-supply milestone. By linking public labels to evidence of implementation, recurring use, coordination routines, market institutions, and external recognition, the framework treats hub naming as a sustainability–accountability issue tied to SDG-related infrastructure claims and ESG disclosure integrity, rather than merely as project branding. Full article

Fixed-bottom or floating offshore structures are the foundations, platforms, and associated infrastructure that allow for oil and gas production systems, offshore wind turbines, and cabling. The remote nature of these structures and the harsh environment with high variability in wind, waves, currents, and weather make construction activity very difficult and unpredictable; the cost of variation in the schedule can lead to high construction vessel and personnel costs. The adoption of artificial intelligence using trends observed in historical data can help achieve more accurate construction costs and schedule predictions, reducing the capital expenditure cost of installation. A resource-significant activity, sometimes called a resource-critical activity or high-resource-demand activity, is an activity on a construction or project schedule that consumes a disproportionately large share of one or more resources compared with others. Plant Design Modelling (PDM) is a digital process that creates and manages a detailed 3D model of a building’s physical and functional characteristics and semantic information, such as cost and schedule. PDM serves as a single source of truth for multidisciplinary activities and, therefore, serves as a rich data source for various construction applications, including project scheduling and cost estimation. Neural networks (NNs), a subset of machine learning algorithms inspired by the human brain, excel at identifying patterns in complex datasets and making predictions, such as forecasting costs based on non-linear relationships and historical trends. Data from an offshore structure modification project were extracted from Aveva’s Everything PDM, focusing on installation activities to create a dataset for machine learning model training. The structured data extracted exhibit non-linear patterns; therefore, linear, regularised linear, robust linear, and the ensemble (tree-based) models and supervised neural network models with varied architecture and hyperparameter values were evaluated and compared. The best performance was obtained using the deep-optimised ANN model. The result obtained is consistent with previous studies. The neural network models show a superior ability to predict the non-linear nature of offshore construction activities’ time. Full article

Advanced biofuels represent a key option for transport decarbonization, particularly in sectors where electrification is constrained by technical and economic barriers. Their compatibility with existing vehicle fleets and fuel distribution infrastructure enables rapid deployment without the need for major capital investments. In local public transport, biodiesel (FAME), hydrotreated vegetable oil (HVO), and biomethane are mature solutions capable of delivering greenhouse gas emission reductions of 60–90% compared with fossil fuels. Among these, HVO is particularly promising, as an extensive body of literature has consistently shown its potential to significantly reduce engine-out emissions, especially particulate matter (PM) and nitrogen oxides (NO_x). This study reports the results of an experimental campaign carried out on a diesel-powered local public transport bus equipped with a Euro III engine and lacking particulate matter and NO_x after-treatment systems. Emissions were measured using a portable emissions measurement system (PEMS) under real driving conditions, operating the vehicle with neat diesel, a 15% HVO blend, and a 70% HVO blend. Tests were conducted over urban and extra-urban routes. The results show that NO_x emissions decrease proportionally with increasing HVO content, with high-blend ratios (HVO70) yielding estimated reductions of approximately 13–18%, and up to 23% under carefully controlled and comparable urban driving conditions. Based on these findings and the existing literature, HVO proves to be a useful instrument to meet 2025–2030 climate and air quality targets (particularly NO_x and PM emission reductions), alongside electrification and modal shift measures, if used in public transport fleets. Full article

Driven by the global low-carbon transition and the rapid expansion of marine energy development, offshore integrated energy systems are emerging as a critical configuration for coupling offshore renewable resources, geothermal and subsurface thermal resources, oil and gas infrastructure, hydrogen pathways, multi-carrier networks, and offshore loads. Unlike onshore integrated energy systems, offshore systems are constrained by resource intermittency, harsh marine environments, platform space and weight limits, long-distance transmission, operation and maintenance accessibility, safety risks, and cross-regional governance mechanisms. Recent studies have advanced offshore wind-to-hydrogen systems, oil and gas platform electrification, offshore energy hubs, platform repurposing, and offshore geothermal utilization. However, these studies remain fragmented in terms of system boundaries, multi-energy coupling mechanisms, engineering constraints, and optimization methods. This paper reviews offshore integrated energy systems from the perspectives of system configuration, key integration technologies, optimization and assessment methods, and future research needs. Offshore integrated energy systems are first classified into offshore renewable-energy-dominated systems, offshore wind–hydrogen systems, oil and gas platform integrated systems, offshore energy hubs and multi-carrier networks, decommissioned-platform repurposing systems, and offshore geothermal and repurposed-well systems. Resource-side, conversion-side, storage-side, network-side, and load-side integration technologies are then summarized. Capacity configuration, operational scheduling, stochastic and robust optimization, multi-objective optimization, energy, exergy, economic, and environmental (4E) assessment, advanced exergy analysis, and energy-hub modelling are further reviewed. Finally, key research gaps are identified, including resource uncertainty, offshore engineering constraints, multi-carrier network coupling, insufficient demonstration data, and policy and economic uncertainty. This review provides a structured reference for the modelling, integration, optimization, and demonstration of offshore integrated energy systems for low-carbon transition. Full article

Offshore geothermal energy and the reuse of decommissioned oil and gas platforms are emerging as linked pathways for reducing the carbon intensity of marine energy supply while extending the value of mature offshore assets. This review examines offshore geothermal development from a full-chain perspective that connects resource assessment, platform and wellbore reuse, heat extraction, medium- and low-temperature conversion, multi-energy coupling, techno-economic evaluation and environmental risk management. The paper first clarifies the resource logic of offshore geothermal systems, especially sedimentary-basin resources that spatially overlap with mature petroleum provinces. It then analyzes two principal engineering routes: the reuse of existing offshore platforms as energy hubs and the reutilization of abandoned wells as open-loop or closed-loop heat-extraction systems. The review finds that platform and wellbore reuse can reduce drilling demand, shorten offshore construction cycles and lower life-cycle environmental burdens, but engineering feasibility remains constrained by wellbore integrity, thermal losses, corrosion and scaling, platform life extension, regulatory liability and the limited availability of field-scale demonstration data. Coupling geothermal energy with offshore wind power, hydrogen production, OTEC and desalination can improve system stability and equipment utilization; however, standardized assessment boundaries and comparable cost models are still insufficient. Future research should focus on resource-engineering-economic integrated assessment, standardized reuse packages, long-term offshore reliability databases, corrosion-resistant material systems, auditable TEA/LCA models and risk-based regulatory frameworks. This review provides a technical basis for offshore geothermal pilot projects and for the low-carbon transformation of offshore oil and gas infrastructure. Full article

Railway transportation networks increasingly share constrained corridors with transmission lines, buried pipelines, and other linear infrastructure. Electromagnetic interference in these corridors is important for safe railway planning and operation, particularly when nearby high-voltage lines cross oil and gas pipelines. This paper investigates transmission-line-induced pipeline potential under crossing conditions in the Zhangbei region. The CDEGS moment-method framework is applied with locally refined segmentation in the crossing regions, and an electromagnetic coupling model for multiple-crossing transmission line-oil and gas pipeline systems is established. The qualitative effects of crossing angle and parallel length on pipeline potential were obtained under both normal operating conditions and single-phase ground fault transient conditions. The results show that induced voltage decreases nonlinearly as the crossing angle increases and rises markedly with crossing length. The contribution of ground potential rise during transient processes to pipeline potential is significantly greater than that during steady-state processes. Installing zinc ribbons as a drainage measure can reduce the pipeline-to-ground voltage. However, supplementary mitigation measures may still be required under severe interference conditions. These findings are relevant to railway transportation because railway corridors often coexist with transmission lines and buried pipelines, making coordinated electromagnetic compatibility assessment essential for infrastructure safety and operational reliability. The proposed framework supports corridor planning, risk assessment, and protective design for railway-related infrastructure in complex shared corridors. Full article

The increasing global demand for marine energy resources, coupled with the deployment of offshore oil and gas pipelines and submarine power cables, highlights the requirement for reliable subsea infrastructure. To protect these assets from environmental hazards and anthropogenic disturbances, seabed burial via trenching is widely adopted, with submarine trenchers serving as the main installation equipment. Trenching involves excavating a trench on the seabed to place pipelines, cables, or other subsea infrastructure. These operations involve complex soil–tool interactions that fundamentally govern cutting resistance, trench-wall stability, and overall equipment performance. Specifically, distinct engineering challenges arise across different trencher configurations: plough trenchers often encounter complex seabed structures, jet-type trenchers are prone to trench sidewall collapse, and mechanical trenchers face cutting difficulties in hard clay. A thorough understanding of these interactions is therefore critical for resolving operational challenges and optimizing trencher efficiency in engineering practice. To deeply understand these type-specific issues, this review summarizes the geomechanical problems associated with various trenching technologies, synthesizes recent research advances from analytical frameworks, physical experiments, and numerical simulations, and identifies existing knowledge gaps. By consolidating these findings, the paper provides a reference for addressing trencher-related engineering challenges, supporting equipment optimization, and facilitating the deployment of offshore energy transmission networks. Full article