Energy Traceability and Life Cycle Analysis Manager
Dr. El-Houjeiri is the Energy Traceability and Life Cycle Analysis Manager at Saudi Aramco. He leads the team responsible for mapping the global oil and gas infrastructure and advancing the understanding of energy supply chain emissions. While a fellow at Stanford University, he developed greenhouse gas emissions models for crude oil production and helped establish crude oil carbon intensity guidelines for state regulators in the United States. Before joining Aramco, he assessed oil and gas emissions performance and supported carbon strategy development at Royal Dutch Shell. He holds a Ph.D. in Engineering Science from Oxford University.
May 29
As a collaboration between industry and academia, The Archie Initiative uses open-source, engineering-based models, informed by public and proprietary data sources, to estimate energy supply chain carbon intensities worldwide. For crude oil, the country-level carbon intensities, from well to pump, range from ~50 to 200 kg of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) per barrel. This wide range is a function of the many sources and uses of crude oil from one country to another. While fossil fuel combustion accounts for most of its life cycle emissions, producing, transporting, and refining crude oil into fuels such as gasoline and diesel accounts for ~15 to 40% of the "well-to-wheels" life-cycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of transportation fuels. Reducing emissions from petroleum production is particularly important, as current transport fleets mainly depend on liquid petroleum products. The Archie Initiative models the well-to-pump CI of most major active oil fields worldwide, identifying significant drivers of these emissions. The CI estimates in 2021 cover over 4,100 oil fields in 96 countries, representing 92% of global crude oil production. The Archie Initiative also accounts for oil transport, refining, and production activities as part of the supply chain analysis. The transport CI varies from 1 to 37 kg CO2e per barrel of oil delivered to the refinery entrance depending on pipeline and ocean vessel design requirements, transport distances, and supporting processes. The Archie Initiative accounts for the complexity and product slate of more than 460 refineries and shows that the global refining CI ranges from 8 to 78 kg CO2e per barrel. Data-driven CI estimates can potentially encourage prioritizing lower-CI crude oil sourcing, point to methods to manage crude oil CI and enable governments and investors to avoid "locking in" the development of higher-CI resources. However, future progress in this direction will rely on improved reporting and increased transparency about oil-sector emissions.
