How digital transformation is reshaping energy systems

A balanced planet requires more energy with less carbon. The energy transition to a lower carbon future is arguably the largest and most significant challenge ever contemplated or attempted in the history of our planet. Achieving a balanced planet means our current energy mix must evolve to include more lower- and zero-carbon forms of energy, such as geothermal and hydrogen. Hydrocarbons, however, will still play a critical role for decades to support a secure energy mix, so it is imperative that the industry’s operations decarbonize rapidly.

Digital technology is key to ensuring the reliability and sustainability of today’s energy systems and creating and scaling the energy systems of tomorrow.

Today, the adoption of digital technologies is making a material impact on the oil and gas industry. It is improving efficiency, reducing cycle times from exploration to production, and increasing productivity while lowering costs, reducing risks, minimizing the footprint of operations, and lowering greenhouse gas emissions.

What’s driving the impact?

Three key technologies are driving this impact—the cloud, edge, and artificial intelligence (AI).

The cloud represents a genuine technology and business paradigm shift. It enables near-limitless computing power to be applied to the complex modeling and simulation processes essential in understanding the earth’s subsurface, collapsing cycle times in field development processes from months to days. Further, the cloud enables data to come together from all corners of an operator’s business, connecting planning to operations, the subsurface to the surface infrastructure, and experts to data they can trust.

Edge computing promises new levels of system connectedness, paving the way for closed-loop decisions and advanced automation and autonomy. Wells, as just one example, are a key component of the oil and gas value chain and remain the primary way of accessing and extracting oil and gas. From well construction to production operations right through the life of a well, digital operations are fundamentally reshaping how the industry works. Autonomous drilling of entire well sections is now a reality thanks to AI and edge computing and advanced digital workflows. This is resulting in more consistent and efficient drilling and faster well delivery, while reducing costs and carbon emissions, not to mention improved safety.

AI can make sense of the data coming from huge and scattered information sources much better and faster than humans can do using conventional approaches. SLB in partnership with Geminus AI recently delivered a hybrid AI application that uses data-based and physics-based approaches to optimize economic performance while reducing carbon emissions at a natural gas plant. The application has the capability to evaluate 20,000 complex scenarios in under a tenth of a second, enabling operators to interactively explore the impact of changing process settings on the plant’s carbon footprint and yield. Generative AI promises to transform again the way we interact with technology.

The future of energy systems

As digital technologies lower the carbon intensity of oil and gas operations, they are also paving the way for the new energy systems of tomorrow. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and International Energy Agency agree that net zero will be difficult to achieve without carbon capture, utilization and storage, an innovative technological approach to reducing carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and industrial facilities. Digital technologies are critical for planning and operating these systems. Optimized digital twins that can accurately predict and simulate the behavior of these reservoirs would enable cost-effective and rapid scale up, ensuring both safety and performance over the life of these projects.

Many of the lessons learned in the digital transformation of the oil and gas industry are applicable to new energy sectors like wind, solar, and hydrogen as they continue to grow and become a larger part of the energy mix.

In both oil and gas and new energy systems, the impact of digital transformation will increasingly intensify. Only 20% of SLB’s oil and gas customers, for example, have started their transition to the cloud. Automation and autonomous operations have only scratched the surface (and subsurface). As with other sectors, the energy industry is just now beginning to tap the transformational potential of AI and generative AI. From digitally connected solutions that reduce personnel footprint in the field or make operations more efficient to measuring, reporting and taking prescriptive actions that reduce or eliminate emissions, digital and AI will play a massive role in ensuring the sustainability of today’s and tomorrow’s energy systems.

Rakesh Jaggi is president of Digital & Integration at SLB.

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