Climate Pledge arena sign unveiled as Amazon unveils big oil works

On Tuesday, the blue and green sign will be displayed at the top of the Climate Pledge Arena unfolded to be placed atop the home of the new Seattle hockey team. Amazon bought the naming rights

highlight the company’s plan to achieve net zero emissions by 2040 and invest $ 2 billion in venture capital on the way to get there.

The same day, the company also hosted Shell to discuss an industry-wide oil and gas initiative to accelerate mining using Amazon’s cloud computing in AWS re: Invent

, which he called “the biggest cloud computing event of the year”. The multi-week conference gives companies the opportunity to highlight how they are using Amazon Web Services cloud software to improve their bottom line. It includes a name-neutral “energy” track that only features players in the oil and gas industry, including giants like Shell, ConocoPhillips and Phillips 66. The juxtaposition shows that the Amazon Climate Pledge is still largely an exercise. branding. It covers the actual damage your services are causing to the planet.

Discussions from leading fossil fuel companies at Amazon’s cloud computing conference show how deeply the company is tied to the most responsible frying industry of the time. P from GizmodoPrevious reports have exposed how Amazon has actively courted the major oil partners and participated in major oil and gas conferences to promote its services. This week’s AWS re: Invent presentations show how Amazon is also inviting these companies to highlight how The company’s various cloud computing software offerings help fossil fuel companies identify where to place rigs and extract the most from fossil fuels.

The presentation by Johan Krebbers of Shell, managing director of emerging digital technology and vice president of IT innovation, focused on the Open Subsurface Data Universe or OSDU. The universe extends far beyond Shell to include oil majors like Exxon, Chevron, BP, Equinor, Marathon and Anadarko, as well as national oil companies like Petrobras and PTTEP. It also includes the heavyweights of cloud computing beyond AWS; Google and Microsoft are also among the service providers for OSDU. The goal is to suck all kinds of data from the underground that oil companies collect and use an open source platform that, according to the description of the conference, “Provides the energy industry with optimized exploration, development and production workflows to increase efficiency across the entire value chain.” In the case of fossil fuels, this means extracting more oil and gas from the ground more efficiently and quickly to maximize profits.

“Having an infrastructure always available is essential. If, for example, you are a geologist and you try to extract a variant of a seismic cube that has to work overnight, ”said Liz Dennett, senior solutions architect for Amazon Web Services, at the analysis conference of the basement that geologists do. “If the extraction of this attribute fails, it could delay the maturation of your prospect and make a simulation, not a fictitious decision. In fact, I went there. AWS’s extensive and reliable global cloud infrastructure delivers seven times less downtime than the next largest cloud provider.

Krebbers outlined how the platform could do it for most of the discussion before rolling it out from renewables at the end. However, as Steve Nunn, president and CEO of Open Group, which houses OSDU, pointed out in a promotional video As of March, the companies involved in OSDU and using AWS are all fossil fuel producers. Some, like BP and Repsol, have said they plan to turn more to renewables, but even then their plans to do so are seen as woefully insufficient to deal with the climate crisis.

ConocoPhillips also presented how it uses AWS cloud computing to optimize hydraulic fracturing operations in the Montney Shale, located in British Columbia and Alberta. The company has 295,000 acres to develop there, including a large purchase in completed in August 2020. The conference again promised to show how ConocoPhillips has used AWS to “reduce capital costs and increase operational efficiency”. Justo Sánchez, data analyst at ConocoPhillips, said in the conference that the data processing system designed with AWS allows the company to reduce data preparation from 8 hours to less than a minute.

The most efficient oil and gas operations essentially speed up the clock to climate ruin. A United Nations report released on Wednesday showed countries plan to increase fossil fuel production by 2% per year this decade, even as science shows it must decline by 6% per year. Amazon’s climate commitment is full of holes

and the employees who asked the company to approach them they were fired. One of the most important, however, is allowing oil and gas companies not only to operate, but also more quickly. So of course the net zero hockey arena is a nice move, but the Climate Pledge Arena may want to invest in a powerful cooling system in the same way that Amazon keeps throwing gasoline on a fire.