The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) coastal basin has been home to modest oil activity for some forty years, whereas the country has enormous potential for hydrocarbon resources in the basins of the central basin and the western branch of the East ...
The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) coastal basin has been home to modest oil activity for some forty years, whereas the country has enormous potential for hydrocarbon resources in the basins of the central basin and the western branch of the East African Rift. In the fight against climate change, the DRC has committed itself, alongside other countries, to reporting its greenhouse gas emissions in all relevant sectors. In the country's first inventory for the period 2000-2018, greenhouse gases from oil production were not included, mainly due to the complexity of the data collection system in this sub-sector and the absence of national emission factors.
The main objective of this study was to estimate Carbon Dioxide and Methane emissions from oil production in Muanda in the coastal basin, based on oil activity data published by the government, using the IPCC 2019 guidelines for the national greenhouse gas inventory. Other data, such as flaring intensity, were taken from the World Bank's Global Gas Flaring Reduction (GGFR) to better understand the emissions that will be obtained.
To achieve this, we opted for the IPCC Tier 1 methodological approach, which favors the use of default emission factors multiplied by total annual oil production to obtain the corresponding emissions. The results showed that over the period 2005-2022, oil production at the Muanda site alone released net emissions of 329,278.43 Gg CO2 and 4,594,582.74 Gg CH4, corresponding to a total of 96,815,515.97 CO2-eq for the two gases. The emission factors used also revealed that Methane is a major contributor to total emissions.
Three emission periods, namely 2005-2008, 2009-2017 and 2018-2022, gave rise to three scenarios during which we observed a general downward trend between 2005-2017, marked by a slight increase from 2018 onwards. This general decrease in emissions is due, among other things, to declining oil production, but also to the predominance of the mining sector over the oil sector in the structure of the Congolese economy, and not to the fallout from the country's ratification of various international treaties on climate change. This lack of oil production has recently been confirmed once again by the Congolese government's decision to auction off other oil blocks in other basins to boost oil production. By 2030, total emissions will be 40717456.73 CO2-eq after application of Excel's linear forecast. The results obtained in this study can serve as a basis for future climate change policies.
As methane is the biggest contributor to total emissions from the production segment, mitigation measures should focus on the sources of methane emissions, the biggest of which remains the flaring of associated natural gases during extraction.