Shell to implement blockchain to boost energy transition

The oil company is researching several initiatives based on the technology to further advance its commitment to become a net zero business in the coming years.

Shell has been boosting its transition investments and efforts to meet its decarbonization goals as well as becoming a net zero company in the near future. Apart from expanding its Recharge initiative across the world with an ambitious plan to boost electric vehicle services, the company is also researching other ways to reach these objectives sooner. Recently, the firm has revealed its intentions of implementing blockchain technology via a series of projects to enhance its strategy.

In a recent interview with Forbes, Dan Jeavons, VP of Computational Science and Digital Innovation at Shell, and Sabine Brink, Blockchain Lead at Shell, discussed some of the initiatives that the company is currently researching to amp its resources while tackling some of the challenges of energy transition.

Blockchain, mostly associated with cryptocurrencies, is a technology based on distributing processes and information encryption that differentiates from most common databases. Information is encrypted and distributed across several sources, such as computers or servers, which leads to any change having to be validated by consensus of those sources and made by people who have the permits required to modify it.

One of the projects that the company representatives talked about involved the use of blockchain to trace and verify the provenance of energy created from renewable sources. The news site specified that this type of implementation can be key in associating with organisations focused on energy transition or building on customer loyalty. The promise of clean energies often opens more doubts than certainties as to its origin and actual consumption, so blockchain implementation could help in tracing the source of the energy and certifying its renewability or its exact amount.

“So if you look at the electricity market today, we have energy attribute certificates (EAC) that represent green energy or grey [non-green] energy generated in a given month or year. For companies that aim to run on 100 percent green energy, their monthly or yearly certificates may match their total energy consumption, but when the sun doesn't shine, and the wind does not blow, grey energy is actually being consumed. So it’s hard to claim that they are actually consuming green energy on a 24/7 basis,” specified Jeavons.

By creating highly granular certificates in real time at the source of the energy, Shell will be able to represent the green energy produced at every half hour, thus complying with established energy attribute certificate systems. This would be achievable by tracking and recording every point of the electron’s journey to its consumption via blockchain.