Enabling carbon reduction in the energy industry

The ways the energy industry captures, transports, stores, and otherwise removes carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere are changing. Led by the European Union (EU), this new global push toward improved industrial carbon management (ICM) requires sophisticated new support mechanisms, including the development of technologies capable of orchestrating the carbon capture and storage (CCS) process from early planning to operations. Microsoft is committed to be carbon negative by 2030 and by 2050 to remove from the environment all the carbon the company has emitted since it was founded in 1975. Our goal is to empower organizations worldwide to accelerate innovation across the entire end-to-end CCS value chain. By leveraging the standardized data model and secure data sharing in Microsoft Azure Data Manager for Energy, along with operations data management powered by Azure AI and Microsoft Copilot, we aim to achieve business goals of net zero, sustainability, and profitability.

Enabling energy industry innovation through modern technology

The process of finding suitable CCS sites is costly and time consuming, and not without its own unique information security risks. Traditional energy industry technologies used during this process both increase in cost over time and contribute to the data silos that exist between the site selection process and operational concerns like site-specific safe liquid CO2 injection speeds and storage capacities. These factors have led to challenging commercial margins of CCS as a process, presenting a barrier to entry for many interested businesses.

The process is not unfamiliar to Microsoft, which has already invested in multiple large-scale CCS projects around the world, including Northern Lights, a partnership between the Norwegian government and energy companies Equinor, Shell, and TotalEnergies. Northern Lights was created to help accelerate the decarbonization of European industry and mitigate its otherwise unavoidable emissions. The project facilitates the capture and transport of industrial CO2 emissions, which it then liquifies and stores safely in the pores of saline aquifers 2,600 meters below the seafloor.

By 2030, Microsoft plans to have an established system that removes five million metric tons of carbon from the atmosphere each year. With Azure Data Manager for Energy and operations data management powered by Azure AI and Microsoft Copilot, Microsoft plans to help increase the return on investment (ROI) of CCS projects, helping customers optimize their costs with AI, automation, and the discovery of new best practices. The global Microsoft partner network further strengthens these capabilities through industry-specific expertise and highly targeted CCS solutions.  

How scalability, standardization, and security contribute to sustainability

There are two divergent paths ahead for the emerging CCS industry, both recursive in nature. On the first and more positive path, companies will see a clear value in negating and offsetting their carbon emissions efficiently and effectively. On the other path, companies could lack the tools that efficiently connect the dots between carbon emissions and offsets, and hence be left with a less clear value proposition. By underpinning the positive path with technology, Microsoft hopes to help industry and humanity at large meet their shared sustainability goals.

Azure Data Manager for Energy is aligned with the highly secure OSDU® and OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA) data standards, which will ease the development of new services and workflows that transcend today’s data silos. This standardization also paves the way for the adoption of co-pilots and other time-saving AI solutions. Combining Azure Data Manager for Energy with other services such as Microsoft Fabric and Environmental Credit Service, Microsoft is positioned to help the energy industry to validate and demonstrate their CCS efforts and carbon credit purchases to regulators in the rapidly emerging and expanding ICM business.

Data standardization and AI readiness are the first steps toward innovative capabilities, especially when paired with the hyper-scalability of Azure. During the process of identifying ideal sites for carbon storage, energy companies run multiple site-specific simulations that traditionally include the manual numerical simulation of seismic data. These simulations are time consuming, complex, and data intensive. They’re also critical to the site selection process, so when companies are given the opportunity to infuse them with AI and run them at scale, there’s massive potential for time savings and efficiency gains.

The ability to scale up the computing power required to run thousands of simulations against hundreds of potential sites when required could help shorten the CCS site selection process substantially. It could also help refine the simulations and their related data models and lead to further efficiency gains. Scaling compute back down after the simulations have been run can help energy companies not only reduce their costs, but also reduce the same carbon footprint the CCS process is helping to address. By running the simulations on Azure, energy companies are taking advantage of hyper-scalability on a cloud that has itself been carbon neutral since 2012.

After months of work going into the selection and analysis of a proper CCS site, energy companies want to make sure their data is not just secure but fully under their own control. If that information were to leak to either the public or their competitors, all that effort and investment could be lost. For this reason, Microsoft is working toward enabling Azure Data Manager for Energy on customer cloud tenants, which will grant them the control they require as well as the layered security of Microsoft managed services in the cloud. For real-time CCS operations data, Microsoft is also developing a reference architecture and toolkit to enable partners to build ICM solutions to deliver value to our customers. 

Clearer skies ahead

With Azure Data Manager for Energy and the power of Azure AI and Microsoft Copilot, Microsoft hopes to give the energy industry the standardization and systemization that its past technologies may not have provided. To keep global warming within 1.5 degrees, the United States Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory reports that the world needs to start removing 10 gigatons of CO2 from the atmosphere annually by 2050.¹ To reach that important milestone in time, the energy industry needs a technological foundation to build its next wave of advancements upon.

If, as the Clean Air Task Force states, Europe alone has the storage capacity for 1,520 gigatons of carbon dioxide emissions, helping energy companies rapidly, cost-effectively identify and provision CCS sites is a big step in the right direction, and one which Microsoft hopes to help the energy industry take.²

Explore more on carbon management

• Discover how Microsoft is powering the future of energy with Azure Data Manager for Energy.
• Learn more and connect with us at upcoming energy events:
  • Image: August 24–25, 2024, in Houston, Texas
  • ONS: August 26–29, 2024, in Stavanger, Norway
  • SLB Digital Forum: September 16–19, 2024, in Monte Carlo, Monaco
• Find out more about Industrial Carbon Management.

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¹Diverse Approach Key to Carbon Removal, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, 2023.

2Unlocking Europe’s CO2 Storage Potential, Clean Air Task Force, 2023.

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Source: Microsoft Industry Blog