Biofuel Technologies and Petroleum Industry: Synergy of Sustainable Development for the Eastern Siberian Arctic

Abstract

This article is a compilation of interdisciplinary studies aimed at ensuring the environmental, political, and economic sustainability of oil and gas-producing countries with a focus on areas with many years of permafrost. One of the main concepts adopted in this research was the desire to show that confronting various energy lobbies is not mandatory and that it is necessary to find compromises by finding and introducing innovative technologies for integrated development for the benefit of society, industry, and the state. This is particularly relevant due to the increasing share of hard-to-recover hydrocarbon reserves, widely represented in the fields of the Eastern Siberian Arctic, and because Russia is the leader in flare emissions. We thus present the relevance of using these gases as industrial waste while reducing the carbon footprint. The technology of biofuel production based on the use of supercritical liquid extraction in a well extractor is presented as a result of the development of the presented experimental devices representing the investigation of the processes of extraction in wells and reactors for the distillation of hydrocarbons from heavy oil components. The obtained yield of the desired product (hydrogen) of the thermocatalytic pyrolysis of the test extract was in the range of 44 to 118 L/h, depending on the catalyst. This information can help inform the direction of future ecological engineering activities in the Eastern Siberian Arctic region.