Overcoming barriers to circular economy implementation in the oil & gas industry: Environmental and social implications

This anticipated consumer demand has put unprecedented pressure on natural resources. Being the highest contributor in the energy transition, Oil & gas (O&G) industry needs to lessen the negative impact of climate change and natural disasters. To combat the impact of emissions and a move towards circularity, O&G industry has undertaken numerous initiatives including energy efficiency, process fuel improvements, and technological transformation etc. But due to certain barriers O&G industry is unable to embrace Circular Economy (CE) implementation in the firms. Therefore, this study has proposed a model to examine the existing critical barriers and suggest strategies to overcome the barriers. The current study has employed an extensive analysis using a hybrid methodology of Fuzzy-DEMATEL (F-DEMATEL) and Best Worst Method (BWM) for assessing the barriers and ranking the strategies. The results showed that 'knowledge barriers' are the most critical in the O&G industry that hampers the implementation of CE currently. Further, the strategies 'Developing collaborative model' and 'Internal research and development, innovation' are the two most significant strategies that may help to reduce the barriers to a minimum. The findings, social and environmental implications are beneficial for the stake-holders and policy-makers to support the transition to CE.