Evaluating strategies to decarbonize oil and gas supply chain: implications for energy policies in emerging economies

The global energy landscape is shifting rapidly, with a heightened emphasis on environmental protection. The oil and gas (O&G) industry is one of the biggest environmental polluters, accounting for 10% of all human-produced greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and its products, including O&G, account for a further 33% of GHG emissions. Therefore, it is high time for the O&G sector to invest in decarbonisation to meet the global climate goal of zero emissions by 2050. This paper identifies 14 strategies to decarbonize the oil and gas supply chain (OGSC) from the extant literature. These 14 strategies pertain to the OGSC upstream, midstream, and downstream. Eight experts from the Iranian OGSC then rank these strategies. The Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory method and intuitionistic fuzzy sets are applied to explore the cause-and-effect relationships between decarbonisation strategies. A prominence relationship map is created for each stream in the OGSC to illustrate the influence of each strategy over other strategies. Results reveal that CO₂ flooding technology in upstream, renewable energy integration for transport in midstream, and carbon capture, utilisation, and storage systems downstream of OGSC are the most effective for OGSC decarbonisation. The main contribution of this study is to bring forward a supply chain wide examination of decarbonisation strategies as well as the prioritisation of these strategies so that researchers and practitioners can focus on the most promising ones. If appropriately implemented, identified decarbonisation strategies will help the OGSC supply chain become climate-friendly and facilitate the attainment of net-zero CO2 emissions.