Optimal Battery Dispatch to Assist a Water Injection System with Offshore Wind Power

The need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at global levels drives the implementation of sustainable solutions. The Oil and Gas (O&G) industry is responsible for considerable emission of greenhouse gases and has been pressured to apply sustainable solutions in its process. Among the options to reduce emissions in this sector, Water Injection Systems (WIS) are suitable candidates due to their high energy demand and high pollutants emissions. WIS is essential for any oil exploitation field since it is responsible for increasing the well’s pressure, resulting in a greater Oil Recovery Rate (ORR). Nonetheless, the traditional methods to power these systems include gas turbines and diesel generators, leading to not just environmental problems, but also operation problems related to weight and space restrictions, especially in offshore installations. In this context, an optimization problem is formulated aiming to analyze the operation of a WIS when powered by an offshore wind turbine and a Battery Energy Storage System (BESS). The optimization aims to maximize the water injection and a sensitivity is carried out to verify the influence of the BESS size and motor pump efficiency in the battery dispatch, volume of injected water, number of times that the pump stops, BESS cycles, and energy curtailed. The results have shown that the BESS size has little influence on the volume of water injected, being more effective in reducing the number of pump stops and the number of equivalents cycles of charge and discharge cycles. Moreover, larger BESS provides a smoother operation at a rate lower than 1C. This sensitivity analysis shed light in the expectation of the system related cost reduction and useful life extension of the BESS and WIS.