Current Initiatives in Carbon Emissions and Safer Operations
Before going into the latest trends in safety and reducing carbon emissions, it’s important we get clear on a few of the key phrases being used as it relates to these subjects.
- Carbon Footprint: this refers to the carbon emissions we as individuals, or as organizations, release into the atmosphere.
- Carbon Neutrality: this refers to the level of effort required to offset the carbon we release into the atmosphere. This can be done by reducing the consumption of carbon, or offset what is used by utilizing renewable resources like wind and solar.
There are quite a few initiatives happening in the energy space currently.
- There are companies that are transitioning from oil and gas to electricity providers.
- There is a lot of focus on trying to find ways to successfully leverage hydrogen as a fuel source in the future.
- There is a carbon capture utilization storage initiative that many companies are starting to invest in, and the U.S. government is supporting via tax rebates.
- We are seeing a global push for electric vehicles and how we can transition traditional gas stations into electric charging stations.
There are, of course, business implications for these changes as well. For example, while fueling a vehicle with gasoline takes 5 minutes, charging a vehicle today takes 20 minutes. So, how can we engage the customer so that they spend that 20 minutes in a qualitative manner?
But with all of these initiatives, there is one very important question that stands out. That is: how do we accurately and in real-time track and measure emissions?
The way this is done today is largely antiquated with both paper-based systems and assumptions utilized. The first step toward greater efficiency, velocity, and accuracy in tracking emissions is to implement real-time sensors that are triggered as emissions are occurring.
Getting there is going to require major changes both in hardware systems and applications as well as overcoming some serious challenges. Let’s take a deeper look at those next.
What are the challenges standing in the way of accurate, real-time tracking of emissions?
Carbon culture
We need to bring awareness of carbon emissions and initiatives to the entire organization. How do we encourage people to track their own emissions and reduce their carbon footprint? What are the motivations and incentives and how will the organization implement change management?
Industrial-scale vs Lab prototype
Many of the initiatives mentioned in the previous section are great in theory but difficult to scale organizationally beyond a lab prototype. To overcome this, organizations will need to invest in an application like Vantiq to achieve real-time feedback and scale your solution across assets, equipment, locations/geographies.
Emission data exchange (Scope 3)
Within the oil and gas industry, there is a huge supply chain involved in the collection, storage, transportation, and utilization of fuel. Organizations must be able to track emission data from their own organization, their partners, suppliers, and consumers.If everybody is on different systems, utilizing different measurements, it becomes very difficult to track.
What is the role of technology in helping solve these challenges?
Technology is a crucial part of this as is the real-time aspect required to accurately track emissions and scale this effort across the organization. It’s not fast enough to go to the cloud and come back down with some data and make a decision after the fact.
Real-time systems require 3 major components:
- Infrastructure. All of this data is being processed at the edge of your application in nanoseconds where low latency is key.
- Connectivity. This is being accelerated with 5G rollouts which is allowing us to carry the data from A to B much faster.
- Getting the Apps Built. This is the hardest part. Building applications that can connect to IoT devices require real-time weather and traffic information- thousands of data streams, to enable real-time decisions. These systems have to sense, analyze, and act, providing situational awareness to an event as it is occurring, which is very difficult.
For example, let’s look at what happened in Texas with winter storm Yuri. A smarter grid like the one that we were able to build for Electra Energy in Israel would have started dynamically responding and communicating with IoT devices. Perhaps it could have provided an earlier warning to better manage any sort of crisis.
The bottom line is that there is so much technology that needs to come together and quickly create outcomes that help create sustainability.
How are Infosys and Vantiq partnering to solve these challenges?
First, the fact that we are partnering together is the essence of how we will be able to solve these problems as none of this can be done with one technology in isolation.
At Infosys, the methodology is as follows:
- CONCEPT
From an approach standpoint, Infosys is helping its customers to define their business problems in the first place. You can’t begin creating a solution without first clearly understanding what you’re solving for. They call this phase, ‘Conversation-to-Creation’.
- ENERGY STUDIO
The Infosys Energy Studio caters to Oil and Gas industry solutions by establishing an incubation center where partners can co-create and collaborate on innovative technologies and solutions in an agile manner.
- PEOPLE & PARTNERS
SMEs from both Infosys and Vantiq, domain experts, and the client can work together in a collaborative way, all under one roof.
Some of the use cases Infosys handles include:
- Adhering to the level of granularity that my business partners request
- Use the environmental footprint data of companies to create effective policies
- Securely disclose my environmental data to my business partners
- Compare the environmental performance of companies to support my choice for a purchase
- Gain insight into the environmental profile of my entire supply chain to identify future vulnerabilities
How the Vantiq Platform Allows Organizations to Build Edge Applications
There are multiple technologies that go into building the type edge applications that can enable organizations in the Oil and Gas industry to accurately track emissions in real-time and improve safety in operations.
The Vantiq platform has 3 major components:
- SENSE
It begins with an ingest mechanism. It allows you to take in streams of data from a variety of sources.
- ANALYZE
Once that data’s been ingested, it’s time to identify the situation of interest. In other words, what are the opportunities or threats that these streams of data represent?
To answer that question, Vantiq has a rules engine and a situational awareness engine that allow you to analyze that data.
- ACT
Then your system must continue to sense and analyze new data within the context of the situation.
Instead of a linear workflow, in a real-time system with several streams of asynchronous data, you have to be able to take the best course of action based on the data coming in.
In other words, the downstream recipient can change decision-making criteria based on those streams of data.
Vantiq’s Next Generation Platform Features
- Event-Driven
Vantiq is a fully reactive, event-driven architecture that enables loosely coupled, highly agile applications to manage real-time data.
- Edge Native
Built from the ground up with the edge in mind, Vantiq is fully containerized so you can dynamically manage how applications are deployed, partitioned, and migrated between any number of nodes on the network.
- Flexible Integration
Enterprise Connector SDK and multi-model data ingestion enable seamless integration across any data source or enterprise system.
- Low-Code
High productivity tools mean applications can be developed in hours and immediately deployed using a drag and drop visual UI.
- Federated and Multi-Tenanted
The Vantiq platform can be loaded once and then securely service a large number of applications and users across a dynamic distributed environment.
- Performance & Scalability
Enable large-scale, mission-critical applications that analyze streaming data from tens of thousands of devices with best-in-class performance.
Vantiq Use Cases
- Smart Grid: Monitor situations and coordinate complex actions in real-time across the energy grid
- Safety and Security: Recognize and immediately act on threats such as unauthorized access, energy theft, or hazardous situations
- Environmental Monitoring: Rapidly sense, analyze, and act on data from sensors detecting weather, soil, water, etc.
- Asset Management: Real-time data concerning asset health, status, location, and more through IoT sensors
- Outage Detection: Manage outages with real-time operational intelligence and efficiency
- Preventative Maintenance: Predict, detect, and respond to performance and maintenance issues to avoid costly unplanned downtime
- Field Service: Identify and dispatch the appropriate service personnel and oversee issue resolution
- Customer Management: Real-time customer billing and payment operations, service visibility, dynamic consumption
- Digital Twins: Connect the physical and digital worlds to monitor, contextualize, and act on complex problems as they develop
- Integrated Dashboards: Combine IoT data, business systems, and external APIs into a unified reporting and alerting system
To learn more about how Vantiq is can enable your organization to increase situational awareness, improve business agility, and modernize the grid, we invite you to download our latest eBook here.