Collaboration Among Industry Experts Is Key to Addressing the Energy Transition

The climate challenge is daunting. More than 80% of our energy currently comes from fossil fuels—the primary source of carbon dioxide—which account for two-thirds of the greenhouse gas emissions warming our planet, according to the latest Global Status Report from renewable energy think tank REN21. As policy commitments call for net-zero emissions, the energy industry is at the heart of the shift to a low-carbon economy.

Given the enormity of the challenge, decarbonization is too big of a problem for any one company or nation to try and solve by themselves. Collaboration and partnerships among those with experience and expertise in the energy industry are essential for the world to meet its energy transition goals.

“The energy industry historically has a track record of strong collaboration, from equity positions in projects to LNG facilities,” says Dan Brennan, Senior Vice President at BakerHughesC3.ai. “The focus for the industry now is to drive even more collaboration toward the big challenges and opportunities related to energy transition, whether it’s emissions reduction or decarbonization. Certainly, our core belief is that digital along with domain expertise will play a key role in helping address those challenges.”

That’s why in 2021, Shell, Baker Hughes, C3 AI, and Microsoft launched the Open AI Energy Initiative (OAI), a first-of-its-kind ecosystem of AI-based solutions for the energy and process industries.

The OAI provides a standards-based framework for energy operators, service providers, equipment providers and domain-specific software vendors to share proven, interoperable solutions across the energy industry, including domain-relevant AI and physics-based models, monitoring and diagnostic solutions, prescriptive actions and services. Participants can contribute or deploy solutions with the confidence that they will work seamlessly across a range of energy facilities.

Each partner brings its unique skill set to this consortium: Baker Hughes, an energy technology company that provides digital, edge and hardware solutions for energy and industrial customers worldwide; Shell, an oil supermajor that has implemented AI applications at scale in its operations and is now offering these solutions to other energy companies; Microsoft, which supports the rapid deployment of large data systems targeted to specific industries and whose software underpins much of the infrastructure of oil and gas companies; and C3 AI, the leading enterprise AI software company that accelerates digital transformation for organizations globally and who has been active in the energy industry through its ongoing strategic alliance with Baker Hughes.

All OAI solutions, such as the ones that Shell is offering, have been built on the BakerHughesC3.ai (BHC3) AI Application Platform and are backed by end-to-end support from BHC3 and hosting on Microsoft Azure.

The OAI augments BHC3 applications with partner-led, domain-specific solutions that accelerate the deployment of AI to create economic value across the energy industry while helping to make energy production cleaner, safer and more efficient.

“Baker Hughes and C3 AI are not in the business of ‘lock-in.’ We want to provide solutions that are of actual business value to our customers,” says Binu Mathew, Chief Technology Officer at C3 AI. “And that means that it’s not just one or two solutions, but it’s providing an ecosystem of solutions that can be plugged in—supported by Baker Hughes and C3 AI—to accelerate time-to-value for our customers.”

A significant advantage of OAI is access to equipment- and domain-specific solutions.

By using field-tested and proven solutions specific to the energy industry’s equipment and operations, operators can significantly reduce their effort and time expended compared to customizing generic solutions. This benefit provides the acceleration imperative to meeting the challenges of the energy transition.

“The appeal for industry players is maximizing value,” says Brennan. “That’s value that either accrues to expanding EBITDA or lowering their cost profile. Obviously, the benefit of leveraging a package solution through OAI is that they don’t have to go and create something that’s already been created. At the same time, referenceability is key; these players want a demonstration of where these technologies have been deployed and been proven. That’s the other benefit of OAI: the network effect.”

How new technologies will support the energy transition

Bringing all this expertise together in one ecosystem is what makes OAI stand out from other offerings in the market. And such a powerful combination of players will encourage other oil and gas companies to use the system for their operations, which is key to the long-term success of the initiative.

Since its founding in February 2021, the OAI has expanded to 6 new members, including Kongsberg, that offer focused software products, domain expertise, and services capabilities to the ecosystem, according to Brennan, who says that dozens of other energy operators and energy-focused software vendors have expressed interest.

Operators can access a comprehensive ecosystem of scalable, interoperable and extensible reliability and process optimization solutions powered by AI and physics-based models. They can also contribute to the OAI, by offering domain-specific extensions or configurations for existing OAI solutions. Domain-specific software vendors can contribute to the open ecosystem by developing additional industry solutions that leverage OAI tools and standardized application programming interfaces (APIs). Equipment manufacturers can augment physics-based models and specialized software with AI capabilities and improve service levels with AI-enabled solutions. And service providers can access the collective technology and domain expertise of the OAI ecosystem and offer codified domain expertise through standardized APIs.

Currently, the OAI is offering reliability and process optimization solutions, including BHC3 Reliability, BHC3 Process Optimization and Shell’s Process Optimizer for LNG, to address industrial equipment and process challenges in the energy industry. Next, the OAI plans to expand to other areas of the energy industry value chain, such as sustainability, asset integrity, scheduling optimization and supply chain.

“We saw significant interest coming out of the initial OAI launch, and the initiative continues to garner strong attention as our team works around the globe on various projects with our customers,” says Brennan. “There’s also a big opportunity when it comes to education. Shell, for example, has a campus where they’re welcoming ecosystem partners to collaborate on R&D activities related to the energy transition, and software and digital, and the OAI is included as part of that.”

One thing is for certain: As we transition to a cleaner, more sustainable world, our ability to make the most of our natural resources depends on technology. A McKinsey survey commissioned by BHC3 showed that 75% of its potential customers consider digital transformation a top strategic priority. For the energy industry, then, joining the OAI seems more a question of when, not if.

“Digital is going to play a key role in supporting innovations that address some of the industry’s biggest challenges related to energy transition. And the path to accelerated adoption of these technologies is going to run through a handful of players that have the domain expertise to understand how to get these solutions developed and deployed at scale,” says Brennan. “My belief is that the OAI will become a bit of a melting pot for those that have yet to embark on a journey to learn from those that have, and I think it will accelerate new innovations through the applicable contributions of IP from others.”