Reshaping the way that business is conducted to do more with less, and better

Oil and gas has been a lagging adopter in the digital realm. Digital adoption reduces the long and complex planning cycles inherent in the energy industry, and using AI-supported analyses drives performance, improving decision making.

Reducing emissions: The low-hanging fruit

One of the foremost priorities for the energy sector is to reduce Scope 1 greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions—those produced as a direct consequence of exploration and production activities. Fortunately, there are several ways in which this can be accomplished with relative ease.

The largest single source of those Scope 1 emissions in the oil and gas sector is methane gas, which is 80 times more potent over a 20-year time frame than carbon dioxide (CO2) and the second largest contributor to global warming overall. Curtailing methane is highly actionable, as most of the gas is released from so-called “super emitting” facilities.

With sensitive and frequent monitoring of these installations via a range of innovative, digital solutions—from satellites to lasers to drones—methane can be detected, and leaks mitigated. Given the short atmospheric lifetime of methane, rigorous control measures like these could eliminate the energy industry’s primary GHG output from the atmosphere inside a generation.

Digital solutions are also helping to characterize and control carbon released in the Scope 1 emissions bracket. Enabling a real-time understanding of equipment performance and usage, companies can measure, plan, and act to efficiently limit and remove waste gases.

Another way the industry can minimize emissions is by removing hydrocarbon use from production activities. Currently, around 5% of daily offshore oil production is used to power platforms, equating to 16 terawatt-hours per year and 200 million metric tons of CO2 per annum. Leveraging wind and solar resources for offshore electrification of facilities—as we see in Equinor’s Hywind Tampen project, and the Innovation and Targeted Oil & Gas process in offshore Scotland—will be a game changer for the wider industry.

Exponential scope (3) for change

While there are relatively straightforward fixes to some sources of emissions, others present an altogether more difficult proposition. Scope 3 emissions, for example, are defined as GHGs that are not produced directly by companies or the assets owned or controlled by them, but that are emitted upstream and downstream throughout an organization's value chain. This encompasses activities from the end use of sold products to employees commuting and can represent 65–95% of a company’s carbon footprint.

The potential scale of the web of emissions radiating out from companies is one issue—measuring them is another. Traceability of emitting sources both up and down the value chain would be a complex task to fulfill for small-to-mid-sized companies with compact supply chains, but the onus is magnified manyfold for larger corporations with globe-spanning footprints. Organizations of all sizes are therefore faced with the seemingly insurmountable task of accounting for the footprint of every one of their potentially thousands of suppliers (and their products) should they wish to address these complex emissions sources.

Once the sources of emissions have been identified and measured, the next requirement is to analyze and audit the enormous volume of Scope 3 data flowing into companies. This entrains notable challenges for data handling—in terms of storage and processing—as well as the dissemination of corroborated metrics to third parties like shareholders and regulators.

Digital tech is at the center of how companies look to automate data collection, founded on accurate calculation and reporting of organizational, asset, and product-based emissions with transparency and credibility.