New Energy Opportunities and Changes

We caught up with Schlumberger New Energy Executive Vice President Ashok Belani to discuss the opportunities for the energy transition and the changes it will bring.

What are the opportunities you foresee for the energy transition?

There are many challenges as far as the energy transition is concerned. It’s the subject of energy, and energy is something that is so fundamental to every walk of life that the first thing you recognize about energy is that, if it’s not employed at scale, or deployed at scale, then it’s going to be practically useless because it is a large-scale item in life.

It’s not simple. It’ll take time, and it’ll take effort, and it’ll take execution. There are risks at every aspect of this story, but at the same time, all those risks are also opportunities, and they make it very exciting as well for the same reason.

What changes will the energy transition bring?

We understood that the world has actually progressed a lot over the last 15 years or so in the world of solar and wind infrastructure development. However, when the world’s energy use changes from fossil fuels to electricity coming from solar and wind, then a lot of other associated changes are required to absorb this change in resource because the characteristics of solar- and wind-related energy are quite different from the fossil fuel energies of the present or of the past.

And these are different in many ways. First of all, solar and wind produce electricity/electrons, and these electrons are going to go toward electrification of as many applications in the world as are possible, so the world will use a lot more electricity in the future—in 2050, supposedly twice as much as what we use today. But that increase in electricity usage has to then be absorbed by energy carriers that can actually move the energy from the place of generation to the place of use and, at the same time, changing all the applications that can use more electricity.

What is the role of Schlumberger in the emerging new energy markets?

Schlumberger naturally is a global technology development and deployment company. And we will be in the world of new energy as well. On top of that, we have learned in the recent past how to form really interesting partnerships with industries that are far away from the world of fossil fuel. And these partnerships are being leveraged in practically all the ventures that we are engaged in today.

I think, in the end, it's all about innovation and business, and there is a lot of that going on in Schlumberger New Energy. To summarize the ventures that we have and in the context of the energy transition that I've spoken about:

• In the world of energy carriers, we created Genvia in hydrogen.
• We created NeoLith Energy in lithium.
• Then, in the world of CCS, we have many partnerships in different industries where the right kind of partners come together in a new business model to capture carbon from the associated industry and sequester it in the subsurface. There are many companies that will spawn, in the world locale, carbon capture and sequestration.
• In the world of geothermal, we created GeoFrame Energy, which is an innovative partnership to develop geothermal projects in the world in a pretty well-known domain like geothermal power.
• And then, last but not least, the innovative energy in the company created this very cool idea called Celsius Energy in the world of building heating and cooling, which is an important sector for carbon management.

That today summarizes the portfolio of Schlumberger New Energy, and there is a lot more to come.