Can Digital Resources Assist in the Wake of Russia’s Energy Ban?
Cutting off Russia’s oil, gas, and coal supplies may be disruptive, but infrastructure efficiency and digital solutions in the US may assist in the long term.
With Russian oil, gas, and coal imports off the table, gas prices are rising throughout the nation, and the local energy business seems to have digital tools to assist manage any output shifts.
President Joe Biden’s restriction on Russian energy imports is intended to persuade President Vladimir Putin to end the conflict in Ukraine.
While policymakers debate how to respond to this new development, local providers of such energy resources may be able to raise output more effectively in response.
Digital resources from businesses like Cognizant and Rackspace, as well as digital transformation support from professional services firms like Accenture and PricewaterhouseCoopers, are available to the oil and gas sectors to help them modernize and operate more effectively (PwC).
- Rackspace, for example, provides cloud-based intelligence services for consumption optimization, risk assessment, and predictive maintenance.
- Cognizant provides leak detection and gas pipeline integrity solutions.
- Accenture claims that digital asset management and smart infrastructures can assist update energy and gas infrastructures and increase operational efficiency.
- According to PwC, its analytics and solutions platform has aided a big gas station chain in modernizing its operations by providing real-time data and competitive information.
Opposing political parties dispute on how much the US needs to depend on Russian energy supplies, although it may be substantially less than countries in Europe.
“It won’t be a disastrous event for us,” says Paul DeCotis, senior partner and head of West Monroe’s East coast energy and utilities practice.
“In the United States, we have adequate refining capacity, especially in the Gulf Coast area, to ramp up rather fast."
Land-based drilling, on the other hand, may take six to one year to obtain oil and convert it into a product, according to him.
Even yet, DeCotis believes the prohibition will have a limited effect.
He also claims that the US has showed robustness in its natural gas mining and operations.
Despite the fact that the nation is coming out of the heating season, when natural gas is in high demand, the driving season is approaching, which, according to DeCotis, pushes demand for oil in the form of gasoline.
While recent worldwide developments are worth noting, the oil and gas sectors have had to adjust production management to unexpected shifts before.
"A number of drilling sites shuttered when gas prices truly dropped,” DeCotis adds.
“They couldn’t possibly be cost-effective.” Fracking gas, for example, suffered some decreases due to a supply surplus at the time.
“The gas industry’s upstream consequences are quite variable,” he explains.
“I don’t believe it’s as stable as the oil industry, which is older and more battle-tested.” I don’t see any major issues with the sector growing up to meet demand.
“All it takes is time.” Meanwhile, he claims that the efficiency of electrical energy consumption in the United States has been increasing for decades.
According to the Energy Information Administration, fossil fuels like as coal, gas, and oil provide around 61 percent of the country’s power, which may make the restriction on Russian resources a worry; however, alternative sources are expanding on this front.
“Smart grid technologies, the digital grid, and rising penetrations of tiny, distributed energy resources - whether solar, wind, geothermal, or fuel cells - have all shown to be quite beneficial,” adds DeCotis.
According to him, this development necessitated investment in grid infrastructure to support innovations like distributed energy resources and electric car charging stations.
“The only way we could get meaningful economic value out of them is if the grid could accept them."
With demand becoming more unpredictable and users producing their own energy, the dynamics of electric utility resource planning have altered throughout time.
"When you put distributed energy resources on the grid at different locations, the utility has control over some of those resources and doesn’t have control over others,” DeCotis explains.
The new issue is to co-optimize demand and supply in situations where demand is changeable and the location of demand is uncertain.
“Utilities are searching for sight and/or control over those resources,” he explains.
As more technology are deployed to the grid edge, electric utilities are feeling the need to digitize, according to DeCotis.
“Once things are digitized,” he continues, “utilities want to establish use cases across many data platforms and databases to provide insights.” “It’s the next step in digitization, which is the analytics component.”
Read more by Jai at CommentaryByJaiKrishnaPonnappan.com
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