Equinor targets data efficiency and a low-carbon future with Microsoft Azure Data Manager for Energy

A more sustainable, data-driven future

Like its peers in the energy industry, Equinor faces a two-pronged task: balancing the ever-increasing global demand for energy with the need to work toward sustainable operations.

“The energy transition is one of our biggest challenges—moving away from our traditional core business of oil and gas toward more sustainable, low-carbon solutions,” says Harald Laastad, Vice President Enterprise Data and Platform at Equinor. “To get there, we’re embracing digitalization as a driver of operational efficiency and cost efficiency. In a competitive industry, that’s one of the things that sets us apart.”

As part of its commitment to do zero harm to people, the environment, and material assets, Equinor intends to become a net-zero energy company by 2050 through carbon-efficient energy production, pioneering low-carbon technologies, and increased investment in renewable energy—Equinor already provides electricity to more than one million European homes with wind power. The company has also set ambitious milestones for 2030 that include halving greenhouse gas emissions.

While Equinor operates numerous facilities loaded with impressively large and complex machinery, data is a key to keeping day-to-day operations running smoothly. “Data plays a fundamental role in our company,” says James Elgenes, Manager Subsurface Data and Information at Equinor. “Everyone is using data every single day, and data plays an essential role in achieving our mission to be simultaneously competitive, profitable, and sustainable.”

Although data keeps Equinor running, access to data has not always been as simple as the company would like. Data has been siloed between different business functions and applications across multiple countries, preventing Equinor employees from making best use of it. “Employees can spend significant time on non-value-adding data-related tasks such as trying to find data, transferring data between tools, and manual data reporting routines,” says Elgenes. “We could see large efficiency gains across the company if we could spend less time on these manual data tasks, and more time analyzing data to validate ideas and create new insights.”

A platform aligned with new industry data standards

The data challenges Equinor faces aren’t unique to the company—they are common issues across the entire industry. To help the industry address its data needs and unlock the innovations and efficiencies that are necessary for a sustainable future, leading energy companies and technology providers came together to create an open-source, standards-based data architecture that facilitates efficient data access and management, known as OSDU™. 

“Instead of every company trying to solve this big data problem individually and preventing any kind of standardization, we chose to work together on a systematic approach to interoperability,” says Laastad. “This benefits the energy companies and also the vendors who make solutions for our industry—they no longer have to tailor-make all their products to each company’s individual data organization scheme.”

While the OSDU Data Platform is an important tool for energy innovation, it can be difficult for companies to implement and maintain, and on-premises installations can lack computing power and scalability which can hinder operational transformation. To facilitate implementation of its data in the cloud, Equinor is working with Azure Data Manager for Energy, an enterprise-grade, fully managed, cloud-based OSDU Data Platform built on the Microsoft Cloud—including Microsoft Azure—that helps energy companies gain actionable insights, improve operational efficiency, and accelerate time to market. 

“Azure is more than just a place to store data or run your compute,” explains Elgenes. “It’s a series of interconnected services that help us automate operations, coordinate efforts, and easily build data pipelines that make it possible to do the data engineering necessary to process, transform, and deliver that data to our employees.”

Equinor was one of the first companies to implement Azure Data Manager for Energy. “The issues we’re facing are too important for us to be waiting in the background—we want to be early adopters,” says Laastad. “With Azure Data Manager for Energy, we have interoperability, exciting ways to combine data, and opportunities to use additional cloud-native solutions from Microsoft and other providers on a cost-efficient platform whose security we trust.”

Breaking siloes to open new opportunities

Equinor is excited about the capabilities that Azure Data Manager for Energy offers to integrate previously siloed data from different parts of the company to advance its business and sustainability goals.

“The energy transition will be driven by data,” says Laastad. “If we can extract hydrocarbons more effectively and efficiently and reduce on-site operations, that directly reduces our emissions. Data is also critical to success in new sustainable energy systems where the margins are much lower and accurate decisions are critical. If we can use seismic data from one part of the company to help another part of the company locate ideal locations for carbon capture and storage, that reduces uncertainty and elevates our chance of success.”

Equinor has already found tremendous efficiencies through its use of Microsoft technologies. “We have hundreds of thousands of well logs now stored in the cloud, and they’re all quality controlled and easily available,” says Elgenes. “It would have taken us 250 years to pull all that data together manually.”

Equinor started adopting Azure in 2017, and the company sees its adoption of Azure Data Manager for Energy as the next phase in an ongoing cloud journey. “It was a natural progression for us,” says Øivind Berggraf, Advisor Emerging Information Technology – Subsurface at Equinor. “We’ve been very happy with Azure and the return on investment we’ve seen so far. The scalability, elasticity, and flexibility of Azure Data Manager for Energy provides us with an ideal foundation for implementing the OSDU Data Platform in a way we wouldn’t have been able to do on-premises.”

Find out more about Equinor on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

OSDU is a trademark of The Open Group.