Blockchain in Oil and Gas Industry: Applications, Challenges, and Future
Trends
- Raja Wasim Ahmad ,
- Khaled Salah ,
- Raja Jayaraman ,
- Ibrar Yaqoob ,
- Mohammed Omar
Abstract
Today's systems, approaches, and technologies leveraged for managing oil
and gas supply chain operations fall short in providing operational
transparency, traceability, audit, security, and trusted data provenance
features. Also, a large portion of the existing systems is centralized,
manual, and highly disintegrated which make them vulnerable to
manipulation and the single point of failure problem. In this survey, we
explore the potential opportunities and applications of blockchain
technology in managing the exploration, production, and supply chain and
logistics operations in the oil and gas industry as it can offer
traceability, immutability, transparency, and audit features in a
decentralized, trusted, and secure manner. We discuss state-of-the-art
blockchain-based schemes, research projects, business initiatives, and
case studies to highlight the practicability of blockchain in the oil
and gas industry. We present the potential opportunities brought about
by blockchain technology in various use cases and application scenarios.
We introduce several systems that leverage blockchain-based smart
contracts to automate the important services in terms of tracking and
tracing of petroleum products, protection of international trade
documents, and coordination of purchasing and bidding activities for
granting oil exploration rights to petroleum exploration and development
companies. Finally, we present open challenges acting as future research
directions.