Digital transformation is touted as one of the methods for energy companies, especially those in oil and gas, to reduce emissions and improve sustainability through the use of data. But what about the emissions caused by data storage and processing itself? 

According to DXC, data centers consume an estimated 3% of global electricity supply and generate 2% of global emissions—about the same as the entire airline industry. As energy companies continue to decarbonize their core businesses, they need to look not only at production and distribution operations, but also at supporting functions and infrastructure.

Colocation in data centers and cloud hosting can reduce emissions, especially when compared to on-premises and corporate-run data centers that can be low-utilization and inefficient. Shared data architectures offer many sustainability (and other) benefits:

• Eliminate the need to transform and process large data sets

• Eliminate the need to store multiple forms and copies of the same data

• Reduce the CPU capacity required to run a global, enterprise-grade analytics platform

• Compound the effects of more efficient data centre design and management

Large data centers and cloud hosting providers are investing in innovative energy-efficient solutions, making them great partners for sustainability-focused energy companies. 

BP has been very public about its efforts to invest in digital transformation throughout its entire business. As an organization that relies heavily on data to manage and improve operations (among other things), BP can work to reduce its footprint from this data processing. 

BP employs digital twins to monitor well production facilities, equipment, and operations to prevent unplanned downtime. The digital twin system is realized by a large amount of operational data from the sensors at the well site and AI-heavy data processing on the backend. Capturing, transforming, moving, and analyzing this data is a potential target for cleaner computing.

BP has designed a comprehensive program to detect methane leaks using gas cloud imaging enabled by drones with on-board sensors and spectral radiometry to monitor flaring emission consumption efficiency. Processing drone-collected imagery requires a great deal of computing power.

BP believes that cloud computing can maximize the energy impact of enterprise data and its potential for carbon dioxide emissions.

While energy companies use data to reduce emissions, they also need to reduce energy consumption and emissions of those data efforts.

How meta.