Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

On the morning of August 17, Beijing time, it was reported that it was a big bang summer for big American oil companies. ExxonMobil and Chevron made record profits as energy prices soared. The new U. S. climate bill includes concessions to oil and gas companies.

In addition to oil companies, some other companies are also secretly making profits. Microsoft, Amazon and other cloud service companies are increasingly providing math for oil majors' efforts to find and extract more oil and gas.

Microsoft is helping Exxon analyze large amounts of oil field data. Amazon is helping drilling companies conduct simulations to maximize the amount of oil they can extract from existing wells.

This is an embarrassment for companies that promise to reduce their own emissions. Microsoft has promised to remove more carbon from the atmosphere by 2030, while Amazon has pledged to eliminate greenhouse gases from its operations by 2040.

Both companies have justified their oil industry contracts, promising to accelerate the transition from more polluting oil to resources with little or no carbon dioxide emissions. And each company is quick to provide examples of how they can help the oil industry move towards a greener future.

Microsoft and Chevron are working on a project to turn agricultural waste into fuel; Amazon Web Services software helps Marathon identify and eliminate methane leaks. At the same time, Microsoft and Amazon say improving the efficiency of oil companies is part of their sustainability efforts to help their customers avoid unnecessary emissions, including those associated with obsolete data centers. and emissions related to old, error-prone software.

Increase oil production since cloud computing providers began selling computing power to oil companies, production by most of the major companies in the industry has risen or at least remained stable.

But neither Microsoft nor Amazon has provided evidence that these projects are succeeding, or that they have succeeded in offsetting the environmental damage caused by increased oil and gas production from their biggest customers. Arno van den Haak, head of AWS energy sales, says the company is helping oil industry customers meet emissions reduction targets, but he doesn't have any figures to support that claim. "We don't have a single solution or a single goal," a Microsoft spokesman said. " Microsoft said it did not have access to customer data, but its energy partners had "shared some achievements and we are proud to be involved".

However, such statements infuriated some critics who argued that oil industry contracts from cloud computing providers extended the fossil fuel era, undermined their environmental commitments and threatened climate disaster. David David Carter, an engineer who resigned from Microsoft last year, thinks: "if you can improve your efficiency at work, you can get more benefits." One of the reasons for Carter's departure is that the company continues to work with oil companies. Rob Day, co-founder of Spring Lane Capital, a sustainability-focused private equity firm, believes that while cloud computing providers have invested heavily in solar and wind projects to power their operations, that is not enough. "on the other hand, it's not good enough," he said. "they are still making oil and gas drilling more profitable."

These criticisms have not prompted Microsoft and Amazon to withdraw from the oil sector, but Alphabet's Google, the third-largest cloud computing company, seems to have been weighed down by employee motivation.

"Dirty Little Secrets" A few years ago, tech giants began to pursue oil companies, eager to get business from this lucrative but technologically backward industry. At first, Amazon, Microsoft and Google were all trying to promote the benefits of their huge computing power. Oil executives are worried about putting data in the cloud and possibly exposing valuable trade secrets, such as well test data.

But the department is rife with inefficiency. Darryl Willis (Darryl Willis), vice president of Microsoft energy, estimates that 90 per cent of the geological and operational information collected by oil and gas companies is idle, sleeping in spreadsheets or documents. At the same time, decades of mathematical models used to assess how much oil a particular well can produce have produced only well-founded guesses.

"99 per cent of what goes into these models is fictional," says Jonathan Carter, who ran technology for the exploration arm of EON SE, the European energy company, between 2012 and 2016. "it's our dirty little secret under the carpet in the oil industry because we make a lot of money from it."

Cloud computing service companies are very good at doing one thing, and that is to process large amounts of data quickly. Carter, who now teaches uncertainty and risk quantification at Coventry University, said the energy company spent weeks simulating an oil well dozens of times before EON began working with AWS. Using the AWS software, EON can run 60000 simulations in a few days to help the company determine the drilling site more accurately, he said. EON said it later spun off its oil and gas exploration business and was investing in "climate-friendly customer solutions".

Rajeev Sonthalia, president of oil services company Schlumberger Co., Ltd., says cloud computing tools can help companies build models and minimize carbon generated by drilling. But the same data analysis techniques are also useful in shortening the time it takes for oil and gas to enter the market. "as long as you continue to cut production costs, you can get more oil production," Sonthalia said. "it has become a growth tool."

Cloud providers can also help oil companies maintain their wells, an expensive and time-consuming process that can extend the life of the wells. Leo Mariani, a director and energy analyst at MKM Partners LLC, a securities research and trading firm, says cloud computing is helping maintainers find the best route through vast oilfields in remote and inaccessible areas.

Chevron has purchased as many as 400 HoloLens helmets from Microsoft and regularly uses this augmented reality technology for a variety of tasks, including on-site investigations and security assessments. The remote assistance function allows experts in the office to guide on-site workers to carry out inspection, maintenance and other work. In an investor report, Chevron said it helped Microsoft design this version of the HoloLens helmet. In a statement, the company said its digital investment strategy would, among other things, improve reliability and lead to higher returns and lower carbon. "We are looking to develop a low-carbon business with our traditional line of business," Chevron said. we plan to make a $10 billion low-carbon investment by 2028. "

Halliburton and Woodside Energy Group Co., Ltd. are one of several oil companies that use AWS server farms to sift through large amounts of seismic data, which are difficult to analyze with ordinary computers, and cloud computing enables them to map potential oil and gas locations. Microsoft engineers worked together to complete a Chevron project at the Tengriz oil field in Kazakhstan. A software engineer sent to the area recalled that he was responsible for complex research tasks, such as building computer vision models for three-dimensional maps of the terrain. The engineer, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Microsoft's commitment to promote sustainable development in the energy industry was "just a marketing slogan."

Peter Bernard, who runs Datagration Solutions, helps oil drillers upload and manage data on servers operated by Microsoft and Amazon every day. He says drilling workers see cloud computing as a way to modernize their businesses and survive boom and bust. "they make a lot of money from our industry, and they will continue to make a lot of money from our industry, but few people mention this topic," he said of cloud computing service companies. "

The most real situation is within the cloud computing company. Microsoft employees have long opposed the company's oil and gas deals, and there are even data showing that the company's additional production in Chevron's Kazakhstan project has increased emissions to 5000 per cent of Microsoft's promised carbon clean-up target. A Microsoft spokesman did not comment on the project, but said the company had developed a strategy to enable partners to achieve net zero emissions. Amazon employees have also protested against AWS's contracts with oil companies.

Microsoft's Willis says he is naive to think that the oil industry can quickly transition from oil to cleaner forms of energy. "Energy is a mixture of love and hate, but no one can leave it," he said. " Willis also said that sharper machine analysis could better predict the best drilling site and eliminate the need for wasteful drilling into the earth. "if you don't need to drill those wells, it will reduce emissions, so this is a great opportunity to help the industry develop," he said. "

However, both Microsoft and Amazon have changed the way they describe working with the oil industry. Amazon has removed profiles and Derrick maps of "digital oilfields" from its website and replaced them with an e-book about clean energy and an e-book called ways and principles of Energy Transformation. Microsoft's promotional materials have also replaced pictures of oil fields with windmills.

Google promised to stop selling machine learning tools for oil exploration in 2020 after its employees defected, in effect ceding the huge market to its competitors. Mr Santalia of Schlumberger said Google was "quite high-profile away from the oil and gas industry". But he believes Amazon and Microsoft will deepen their relationship with the industry and estimates that spending on cloud services will rise to as much as 75 per cent of the oil company's IT budget in five years' time, up from about 10 to 15 per cent now. Next month, Schlumberger plans to hold a digital forum in Lucerne, Switzerland, to discuss how technology can "provide efficiency and sustainability in the energy sector." One of the meetings will focus on the latest oil field production technologies. Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, will speak at the event.

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