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Introduction: India has the 15th-largest domestic natural gas consumption (NGC), critical to sustainable economic growth. Promoting natural gas will have a crucial impact on production in all industries.

Purpose: This research gives an overview of NGC and gross domestic product (GDP) in India from 1990 to 2021 and investigates the association and nature of causality between NGC and GDP in India.

Methodology: For the years 1990 through 2021, we used annual statistics from the NGC and the GDP of India. Both research variables data have been taken from the World Bank Indicator.

Findings: There is no causality and correlation between natural gas and GDP in India.

Practical Implications: Based on the research, the Government of India can create different policies for substituting natural gas for other energy sources to have a healthier impact on a sustainable environment in the short and long term. In the future, researchers can work on environmental degradation and GDP.

We conduct a multidisciplinary systematic literature review on climate neutrality in the supply chain. While carbon neutrality has gained prominence, our study argues that achieving carbon neutrality alone is not enough to address climate change effectively, as non-CO₂ greenhouse gases (GHG) are potent contributors to global warming.

We used multiple databases, including EBSCO, ProQuest, Science Direct, Emerald and Google Scholar, to identify articles related to climate neutrality in the context of non-CO₂ gases. A total of 71 articles in environmental science, climate change, energy systems, agriculture and logistics are reviewed to provide insights into the climate neutrality of supply chains.

We find that, in addition to CO₂, other GHG such as methane, nitrous oxide, ozone and fluorinated gases also significantly contribute to climate change. Our literature review identified several key pillars for achieving net-zero GHG emissions, including end-use efficiency and electrification, clean electricity supply, clean fuel supply, “GHG capture, storage and utilization,” enhanced land sinks, reduced non-CO₂ emissions and improved feed and manure management.

We contribute to the literature on climate neutrality of supply chains by emphasizing the significance of non-CO₂ GHG along with CO₂ and highlighting the need for a comprehensive approach to climate neutrality in addressing climate change. This study advances the understanding of climate neutrality of supply chains and contributes to the discourse on effective climate change mitigation strategies. It provides clear future research directions.

Geopolitical risks associated with the return of great power politics and growing nationalism have generated new challenges for foreign investors across industries. Oil and gas companies are well acquainted with such risks and have developed strategies to manage them. This paper reviews five of these strategies: divorcing ownership control from operating control in designing collaborative ventures; proactively managing stakeholder relationships; ensuring transparency and communication; diversifying risks while proactively positioning for emerging opportunities; and deliberately planning for exit should such an eventuality arise. Firms outside of oil and gas can draw on these strategies as they navigate the emerging geopolitical context.

This paper reviews five strategies that oil and gas companies can use to manage geopolitical risk: divorcing ownership control from operating control in designing collaborative ventures; proactively managing stakeholder relationships; ensuring transparency and communication; diversifying risks while proactively positioning for emerging opportunities; and deliberately planning for exit should such an eventuality arise.

This study identifies several strategies that oil and gas companies have used to manage geopolitical risks. These tools will be increasingly important in the shifting global political landscape.

Drawing on the experiences of oil and gas companies, this study has identified several strategies that companies can use to shield themselves from the risks that are currently emanating from geopolitics. While these best practices originate in the experiences of oil and gas firms, the ability to deftly manage geopolitical risks is becoming an important prerequisite for companies across industries.

In this paper, we aim to provide an extensive analysis to understand how various factors influence electricity prices in competitive markets, focusing on the day-ahead electricity market in Romania.

Our study period began in January 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic, and continued for several months after the onset of the war in Ukraine. During this time, we also consider other challenges like reduced market competitiveness, droughts and water scarcity. Our initial dataset comprises diverse variables: prices of essential energy sources (like gas and oil), Danube River water levels (indicating hydrological conditions), economic indicators (such as inflation and interest rates), total energy consumption and production in Romania and a breakdown of energy generation by source (coal, gas, hydro, oil, nuclear and renewable energy sources) from various data sources. Additionally, we included carbon certificate prices and data on electricity import, export and other related variables. This dataset was collected via application programming interface (API) and web scraping, and then synchronized by date and hour.

We discover that the competitiveness significantly affected electricity prices in Romania. Furthermore, our study of electricity price trends and their determinants revealed indicators of economic health in 2019 and 2020. However, from 2021 onwards, signs of a potential economic crisis began to emerge, characterized by changes in the normal relationships between prices and quantities, among other factors. Thus, our analysis suggests that electricity prices could serve as a predictive index for economic crises. Overall, the Granger causality findings from 2019 to 2022 offer valuable insights into the factors driving energy market dynamics in Romania, highlighting the importance of economic policies, fuel costs and environmental regulations in shaping these dynamics.

We combine principal component analysis (PCA) to reduce the dataset’s dimensionality. Following this, we use continuous wavelet transform (CWT) to explore frequency-domain relationships between electricity price and quantity in the day-ahead market (DAM) and the components derived from PCA. Our research also delves into the competitiveness level in the DAM from January 2019 to August 2022, analyzing the Herfindahl-Hirschman index (HHI).

Artificial fruit ripening is hazardous to mankind. In the recent past, artificial fruit ripening is increasing gradually due to its commercial benefits. To discriminate the type of fruit ripening involved at the vendors’ side, there is a great demand for on-sight ethylene detection in a nondestructive manner. Therefore, this study aims to deal with a comparison of various laboratory and portable methods developed so far with high-performance metrics to identify the ethylene detection at fruit ripening site.

This paper focuses on various types of technologies proposed up to date in ethylene detection, fabrication methods and signal conditioning circuits for ethylene detection in parts per million and parts per billion levels. The authors have already developed an infrared (IR) sensor to detect ethylene and also developed a lab-based setup belonging to the electrochemical sensing methods to detect ethylene for the fruit ripening application.

The authors have developed an electrochemical sensor based on multi-walled carbon nanotubes whose performance is relatively higher than the sensors that were previously reported in terms of material, sensitivity and selectivity. For identifying the best sensing technology for optimization of ethylene detection for fruit ripening discrimination process, authors have developed an IR-based ethylene sensor and also semiconducting metal-oxide ethylene sensor which are all compared with literature-based comparable parameters. This review paper mainly focuses on the potential possibilities for developing portable ethylene sensing devices for investigation applications.

The authors have elaborately discussed the new chemical and physical methods of ethylene detection and quantification from their own developed methods and also the key findings of the methods proposed by fellow researchers working on this field. The authors would like to declare that the extensive analysis carried out in this technical survey could be used for developing a cost-effective and high-performance portable ethylene sensing device for fruit ripening and discrimination applications.

The purpose of this paper is to study the following two issues regarding blockchain crowdsourcing. First, to design smart contracts with lower consumption to meet the needs of blockchain crowdsourcing services and also need to design better interaction modes to further reduce the cost of blockchain crowdsourcing services. Second, to design an effective privacy protection mechanism to protect user privacy while still providing high-quality crowdsourcing services for location-sensitive multiskilled mobile space crowdsourcing scenarios and blockchain exposure issues.

This paper proposes a blockchain-based privacy-preserving crowdsourcing model for multiskill mobile spaces. The model in this paper uses the zero-knowledge proof method to make the requester believe that the user is within a certain location without the user providing specific location information, thereby protecting the user’s location information and other privacy. In addition, through off-chain calculation and on-chain verification methods, gas consumption is also optimized.

This study deployed the model on Ethereum for testing. This study found that the privacy protection is feasible and the gas optimization is obvious.

This study designed a mobile space crowdsourcing based on a zero-knowledge proof privacy protection mechanism and optimized gas consumption.

This chapter addresses a significant topic in Algeria, namely the issue of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), by examining the use of business ethics codes. In recent years, there has been growing interest among companies in implementing practices that can justify their CSR efforts, including the development of corporate business ethics codes. These codes play a crucial role in formalizing the integration of CSR strategies. In Algeria, several companies have adopted business ethics codes; one such example is the companies in the oil and gas sector, the leading oil industry company in Algeria. These companies have implemented a business ethics code to provide justification and guidance for their CSR practices. The main objective of this chapter is to demonstrate the commitment of companies to CSR through the development of their business ethics codes. It presents the results of a comprehensive analysis of the business ethics codes of Algerian companies in the oil and gas sector. The approach involved the development of an analytical framework with various criteria and an objective examination of the business ethics code to yield results that aligned with these criteria. The study concludes that the business ethics codes of these companies serve as sources of internal regulation that primarily address ethical concerns and reflects the existing Algerian regulations at the organizational level.

In this paper, the complex flow evaporation process of droplet impact on the liquid film in a horizontal falling film evaporator is numerically studied based on smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) method. The purpose of this paper is to present the mechanism of the water treatment problem of the falling film evaporation for the high salinity mine water in Xinjiang region of China.

To effectively characterize the phase transition problem, the particle splitting and merging techniques are introduced. And the particle absorbing layer is proposed to improve the nonphysical aggregation phenomenon caused by the continuous splitting of gas phase particles. The multiresolution model and the artificial viscosity are adopted.

The SPH model is validated qualitatively with experiment results and then applied to the evaporation of the droplet impact on the liquid film. It is shown that the larger single droplet initial velocity and the smaller single droplet initial temperature difference between the droplet and liquid film improve the liquid film evaporation. The heat transfer effect of a single droplet is preferable to that of multiple droplets.

A multiphase SPH model for evaporation after the droplet impact on the liquid film is developed and validated. The effects of different factors on liquid film evaporation, including single droplet initial velocity, single droplet initial temperature and multiple droplets are investigated.

Occupational safety issues among employees remains a contemporary and omnipresent concern. In developing countries, safety-related problems are amplified, resulting in higher incidences of serious accidents and occupational diseases. This study aims to evaluate employees’ knowledge and attitudes toward occupational health and safety, and how these influence overall occupational health and safety compliance. Ghana’s oil and gas industry provides the contextual backdrop for this research, given it is characterized by high rates of injury.

A positivist and deductive research strategy was used to quantitatively analyze both primary and secondary data sources. A structured survey was administered to industry employees, and multiple linear regression was used to establish the effects of employee’s knowledge and attitude toward occupational health hazards on overall health and safety compliance.

The findings indicate that most employees had both a high level of knowledge and positive attitude toward mitigating occupational health hazards. Moreover, the study reveals that most employees complied with occupational health safety practices. However, the study also reveals that the effect of employees’ knowledge and attitude toward occupational health hazards does not translate into deployment of comprehensive safety practices. Interestingly, female employees were found to be more knowledgeable and compliant with occupational health and safety practices than their male counterparts.

Premised upon the findings, the study recommends: implementation of relevant education and training programs encompassing the proper usage of machinery and equipment, tailored hazard safety training appropriate to specific employee job requirements, effective dissemination of risk information and governance initiatives that enforce strict adherence to correct safety procedures.

The study uniquely examines the influence of employee’s knowledge of health and safety to overall compliance within the oil and gas industry. Cumulatively, the study’s findings and recommendations contribute to improving the occupational health and safety outcomes within the industry.