Shell and Microsoft’s strategic alliance

Title: Shell and Microsoft form alliance to help address carbon emissions

Duration: 09:51 minutes

Description:

Both companies will expand their deep existing technology collaboration to create and deliver new solutions to help customers, suppliers and other businesses lower emissions.

SHELL AND MICROSOFT FORM ALLIANCE TO HELP ADDRESS CARBON EMISSIONS

[Text displays]

Judson Althoff

Executive Vice President
Microsoft Worldwide Commercial Business

[Judson Althoff]

Earlier this year, Microsoft shared some bold sustainability goals. One of them is to go carbon negative. That means we will cut our emissions by more than half and remove more carbon than we emit every year across our entire business, including our supply and value chains. We then plan to take it a step further. We will remove from the environment by 2050 all the carbon we have emitted either directly or via electricity consumption since we started as a company. We are proud to play our role in a sustainable future, but we know that a successful energy transition depends on a collective effort that involves investment and input from the entire energy sector. Take Shell, for example. They are a Microsoft customer, valued supplier and most importantly a trusted partner on our energy endeavors. More specifically, they are one of the world’s largest energy companies, with decades of expertise in innovating and delivering energy solutions for tomorrow. This past January, we set a target this past January to have 100% of the energy we require across our operations, including our data centers, buildings, and campuses be delivered by wind, solar and hydropower energy. This target is only possible because of our partnership with Shell. Today, Dan Jeavons, the General Manager of Shell’s Data Science organization will join me to share more about this work. But first, lets here from Huibert Vigeveno, Downstream Director and Executive Committee member.

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Huibert Vigenevo
Downstream Director
Shell

[Huibert Vigenevo]

Microsoft and Shell each have bold ambitions to decarbonize and a rich history of innovation.

Digital technology will play a key role in the energy transition which is where the expertise of Shell and Microsoft meets. Together we will develop, test and deliver technologies that push the boundaries of what can be achieved. In Shell operations we are already tracking carbon emissions with tools running on Microsoft Azure. We are very proud of our relationship. And today we are going further. We will build products and services to help businesses and industrial customers understand their environmental impact, capture reliable data, and offer practical solutions to lower their carbon emissions. We can unlock tremendous value for Shell, Microsoft and our customers.

 [Graphic displays]

Microsoft logo on black background.

[Video footage]

Split screen of Dan Jeavons and Judson Althoff each standing in front of a green screen

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(on the left)
London, United Kingdom
Dan Jeavons
GM of Science
Shell

(On the right)
Redmond, Washington
Judson Althoff
Executive Vice President
Microsoft worldwide Commercial Business

[Judson]

Hey, Dan, thanks for joining me.

[Dan Jeavons]

It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.

[Judson]

Yeah, I wish we were able to be in person but we'll have to make this studio thing here work for us.

[Dan Jeavons]
Well hey, maybe I can do something about that but we may need some safety equipment.

[Video footage]

Full frame on Judson

[Judson]

Hmm. All right. What do you have in mind?

[Video footage]

Full frame on Dan who throws a PPE helmet towards Judson. Dan’s frame is pushed to the side by Judson’s who catches the helmet and puts it on.

[Judson]

Hey, wow.

[Video footage]

plit screen of Dan Jeavons and Judson Althoff each standing in front of a green screen with helmets on.

[Judson]

This will certainly help, but now I'm intrigued. Where are we going, Dan?

[Dan]

Let me show you. (snaps fingers)

[Video footage]

Dan and Judson appear together in front of an Shell LNG facility. While Dan speaks about data, binary codes are projected on the facility.

[Dan]

So here we are, we're at one of our LNG facilities. These assets are massive and it's really core to our whole strategy that we start to transform these assets as we go through energy transition. We're aggregating over 10 billion rows of data every week from these things and we've got over a trillion rows of data to date. And we're excited about what we can do with that data. Let me show you. (snaps fingers)

[Video footage]

The facility background transforms into a digital drawn interior of the facility. A digital form of Dan and Judson appear together in front of digitally drawn construction of pipes, leverages and basins. While Dan speaks the data flow is highlighted on the construction.

[Judson]

Awesome. Hey, you know, I've always been a Digital Twin fan Dan, but I never thought I would actually be a part of one.

[Dan]

We're rolling these out right across our business and we're using that trillion rows of data that I talked about to ingest into these twins so that our operators and our facility managers can start to see what's going on in real time. We are working with our partners like Kongsberg to do that.

We're using C3 technology running on Microsoft Azure in order to predict when things are going to fail, and we've done this for about 2000 pieces of equipment to date. We can use this data to optimize the facility that you see and that has a big impact in terms of production.

[Judson]

That's awesome, Dan, like I love what you're doing here because it brings to bear so many assets that we have that are differentiated across our partnership, from the IoT sensor fabric itself through the large data states on Azure, the machine learning capabilities and the Digital Twin, all providing this awesome feedback loop so that the folks on the ground at Shell are actually getting the real time insights on how to evolve the operation.

[Dan]

Let me show you what else is going on at the site. (Snaps fingers)

[Video footage]

Dan and Judson appear together in front of an Shell LNG facility again where a small drown is about to fly over. Dan snaps his fingers to freeze the footage of the dronefor a moment. After a few seconds it continues its journey where it inspects highlighted parts of the facility.

[Dan]

Timeout.

We're using drones like this one all across our facility to help keep our inspectors out of harm's way. What's really exciting about this is that the machine vision technology is actually approaching the level of human inspectors and we can identify common issues like corrosion really easily and far more efficiently than we ever could before.

[Judson]

That's awesome, Dan and what I love about it is you're not just using technology for technology's sake. There's a real purpose behind it. You're using it to help make your employees safer and actually have greater yield on the business outcomes. And all of this work is done with Azure?

[Dan]

Yeah, exactly. So we're running all of those machine vision models that we talked about on the Azure cloud.

[Judson]

This is really incredible Dan.

[Video footage]

Dan snaps his fingers again and now both men are standing in front of a screen showing part of the dark side of the earth in orbit illuminated by the city lights.

[Judson]

So let’s jump right in here. Dan, you're almost like watching a mad scientist here. You've done really fantastic work to look at how can Teams become effectively the new user experience? How can low code no code technologies like Power Apps be put to work to obsolesce older and legacy application environments. Then looking at third party SAS environments and platforms, and thinking about how they can modernize Shell's environment. And of course, all of the data platform assets, the AI work, the real true hardcore developer work that you're doing with GitHub. I think though, to me what's most impressive is how you're wiring it all together and really creating solutions that matter for Shell and for your employees and for your customers. How are you flowing all of this together?

[Dan]

Yeah, it's a great question. And I think the key is actually we're bringing these things together in common platforms and pulling services together to allow us to innovate quickly. We're trying to do as little as we can ourselves. We want to leverage the digital capabilities that others provide and tailor the specifics to our business, to drive immediate business impact.

[Judson]

Awesome. Let's talk about Shell.AI. First of all, what is Shell.AI and what are your goals and what do you hope to achieve?

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SHELL.IA IS REALLY A CHANGE PROGRAM

[Dan]

Well, I think Shell.AI is really a change program. We recognized pretty early in this journey that we could develop all the cool tech in the world but actually the challenge is making it real and making it matter for people in the field. And to do that people have to be able to envisage a different world. We've worked really hard on building a community. The community is now about 4,000 people. We run multiple events per month. We develop common training programs and we run things like hackathons across the business and all of this comes together to help us shape the community in a way that they're willing to receive and embrace the new technology and deploy it at scale in the field.

[Judson]

So can you tell us a little bit more about how you're trying to shape the community?

[Dan]

Well it starts with common tool sets. So we talked already about the Stack. We're using common Microsoft foundation tools, things like Databricks and ADLS Gen2 as the core of bringing all that data together. We're also using things like Event Hub, which are key to some of that streaming technology that you saw. And then on top of that we're using capabilities like C3 to develop the predictive maintenance models, but also self service tools, things like Alteryx and Power BI. So that's one aspect of it. I think the second aspect which is really important is that we're trying to make sure that the cases that we work on really matter, that they're high value and real impactful cases, both for our internal business,

[Graphics with text displays]

[Graphic] Ascending line [Text] Optimization and predictive maintenance
[Graphic] Droplets [Text] Shell Remote Sense for engine lubricants

[Graphic] Leafs [Text] Carbon capture and storage monitoring

[Dan]

I mentioned optimization and predictive maintenance, but also for some of our new businesses. That might be things in the sustainability space.

[Judson]

That's fantastic, Dan. Look, again, a fantastic use of technology, a huge impact obviously to Shell's operations and most importantly, a huge impact on the planet. The investments that Shell has made in sustainability are noteworthy. You know well the commitments we've made to sustainability and frankly, we can't get there without you. Last thing I think, Dan, you've had the opportunity to get a sneak peek on some of the announcements that we've made here this week at Ignite. And I'd just love to get your feedback on the things that excite you most about what we're announcing in the Data and AI space here at Microsoft.

[Dan]

Yeah. Thanks so much. And just to say, I think what's really cool is the shared vision of the world that we have around how these technologies can be deployed in businesses like ours. I know you're increasing the focus on Delta and Delta Lake, and I think particularly some of the enablement that you're bringing to that, to really upscale and extend the capabilities and also enable streaming technology will be really useful. And I think the second piece is the investment in mixed reality and trying to link the digital and the physical world by those common objects. And I think, as you've seen, that physical and digital is coming ever closer together and finding ways to bridge that is going to really help that adoption.

[Judson]
That's awesome. Dan, I really appreciate it. You're putting technology to work for purpose, and purpose that really is aligned to Shell's business and the outcomes that matter for the planet. So thanks very much Dan for for being with me here today.

[Dan]

Thanks for coming with me on the tour.

[Video footage]

Dan and Judson fade into their own green screen spaces again in a split screen.
Judson gives Dan a thumbs up. Image fades out

[Text displays]

London, United Kingdom (on the left where Dan is)
Redmond, Washington (on the right where Judson is.