Accelerate the Energy Transition with IIoT  

According to the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change, ‘Net zero’ refers to achieving an overall balance between emissions produced and emissions taken out of the atmosphere. In the last year a host of countries have committed to significantly cutting their carbon emissions, but that won’t be possible without some big changes to the oil & gas industry. Many supermajors are already on board, with more and more industry players regularly jumping on board.

In order to deal with the rising pressure to reach net-zero operations” and move towards greener initiatives, the industry needs to resolve many challenges at different levels, as pointed out in the World Energy Outlook special report. 

“No energy company will be unaffected by clean energy transitions. Every part of the industry needs to consider how to respond. Doing nothing is simply not an option.” – Dr Fatih Birol, IEA Executive Director

The Oil and Gas Industry in Energy Transitions – Analysis – IEA

The report points out that the demand for energy is not reducing with a growing world population. And although the overall energy consumption has dropped due to COVID-19, this will only be temporary. To achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement, Oil & Gas companies need focus on reducing greenhouse gas emissions from their operations and business models:  

 “As of today, 15% of global energy-related GHG emissions come from the process of getting oil and gas out of the ground and to consumers. Reducing methane leaks to the atmosphere is the single most important and cost-effective way for the industry to bring down these emissions.”

The industry already has many of the tools needed to address operational challenges, but often they aren’t scalable or uniformly adopted across the organization. Companies adopting new technologies are finding it easier to face these new challenges head-on. Data availability, geographical differences, and asset disparity be damned! These companies are finding that for many of these energy-related opportunities, digitalization and self-service advanced analytics is helping to accelerate the needed transitions. They can use real time-based analytics to immediately analyze data to make data-driven decisions for improving plant performance and reliability. But there are more ways to contribute to Net-Zero Operations, such as using renewables in operations, reducing flaring and venting Co2, improving operational efficiency and others.   

Today, data is gathered within each business process, in all formats, and sometimes for unknown purposes. With the growing collection of data, cost reduction for storage, and increasing power of software tools and platforms, we will see new emerging trends in advanced analytics for the industrial manufacturing process industries.