Microsoft And Shell Announce New Partnership To Use Artificial Intelligence And Tech To Reduce Carbon Emissions

Tackling carbon emissions is one of the biggest challenges faced by the world today. For big business, this means making a strategic and managed move towards increasing the use of renewable energy sources, as well as creating efficiencies across all aspects of their operations.

It’s a difficult task to manage alone, even for an enterprise on the scale of tech giant Microsoft or energy titan Shell. But working together creates new possibilities that go further than what it is likely they could accomplish individually. Beyond meeting their own zero-carbon commitments, there’s the opportunity to help other companies within their vast ecosystems of customers and suppliers to meet their environmental and safety goals, too.

This was the topic of a conversation I had this week with Judson Althoff, Microsoft’s executive vice president for worldwide commercial business, and Huibert Vigeveno, downstream director at Shell.

We spoke to mark the announcement of a major partnership between the two companies, with the aim of combining Shell’s expertise in clean and efficient energy creation with Microsoft’s expertise in cutting-edge technology, such as artificial intelligence (AI), cloud computing, and the internet of things (IoT).

This has resulted in a number of initiatives to reduce carbon footprints – including helping Microsoft to meet its commitment to becoming carbon neutral by 2025, as well as to develop safer and cleaner working environments.

Althoff told me, “When we made those commitments, it was pretty clear that we wouldn’t be able to do it by ourselves, and quite frankly, we were reliant on technology that didn’t exist at the time.

“What we’re excited about with this announcement is that the tech and innovation partnership with Shell will help us get there.”

Projects so far launched have involved Microsoft AI specialists teaming with Shell data scientists to probe areas of operation where cooperation is likely to have the deepest impact. This has led to the development of 47 separate applications designed to reduce the carbon footprint of the business of energy production. The data storage and compute workload is handled through Microsoft’s Azure platform, so insights and efficiencies gained in one area of operation can be put to work to benefit any other area. This has included building “digital twin” functionality to create a simulated, virtual model of the entire energy generation process. As well as optimizing their own operations, the solutions will also be offered as a service to any other organization they work with that might benefit from them.

Althoff describes the concept of building the digital twin in terms of putting a “sensor fabric” across all areas of Shell’s operations – a fabric that has so far collected over 10 billion rows of measurements and observations.