At Equinor’s giant new North Sea oilfield, thousands of sensors feed into Data Gumbo’s novel blockchain platform—encoding an immutable record of operations, the better to automate contracts, pay vendors and even measure carbon emissions.
In the frigid North Sea, 90 miles off the coast of Norway, oil giant Equinor has developed one of the biggest projects in its 50-year history—a 300-foot-tall platform called Johan Sverdrup, which when it hits peak output will be gushing 750,000 barrels of oil per day.
The company changed its name in 2018 from Statoil to Equinor (i.e., Equity+Norway), and new CEO Anders Opedal has pledged to make it carbon-friendly as the first “net-zero” oil company by 2050.
In the interest of optimizing efficiency, Equinor has outfitted Johan Sverdrup with thousands of sensors monitoring everything from how much oil is flowing through pipelines, how fast new wells are being drilled, to how much diesel fuel the facility is consuming.
All told, Johan Sverdrup’s sensors generate the equivalent of 15 high-def video streams, which are transmitted continuously to Houston-based startup Data Gumbo, which encodes the most important data onto a proprietary, immutable blockchain ledger called GumboNet.
Equinor figures that in its first year of operations Johan Sverdrup saved $20 million thanks to Data Gumbo.
“If you’re measuring the utilization of machines in the field, and know their efficiency and fuel usage, you should be able to provide a carbon footprint,” says Bruce.