On Monday, Reuters International Business Machines Corp and Amazon Web Services said they would work together to extend the reach of a set of tools that oil companies use to manage disparate types of data.
In 2018 Amazon worked with Royal Dutch Shell to create a technology that can turn data from over a century of oil production into a standardized format for multinational oil companies to improve efficiency across their operations.
The technology is shared industry wide on an open-source basis and only works in cloud computing data centers. Some oil producing countries such as Nigeria, Saudi Arabia and Russia have no Amazon data centers, but require companies to store their data within the country's borders.
IBM and Amazon have worked together to solve the problem. Oil companies can use IBM technology called OpenShift to use the oil-industry cloud data tools in their privately owned data centers within their countries.
In an interview, Manish Chawla, global managing director for energy, resources and manufacturing at IBM, said that the data residency requirement is nearly 50% of the oil producing world. This is a very important part of the market. Bill Vass, vice president of engineering at AWS, said expanding the reach of the data tools would help oil companies add non-petroleum assets such as wind and solar to their portfolios. Renewable energy requires producers to know their output at different locations at different times.
As they transition to energy companies, it makes it easier for them because they have all their wind data and their solar data, transmission line data, all this in there as well as all that is in there, Vass said.
You don't have a concept of how complicated the energy grid is until you look at all of these different ways of transmitting energy.