My heart goes out to all those affected by the fires in and around Los Angeles. As someone who was evacuated for a fire in the summer of 2024, I understand the feeling of packing up and leaving home without knowing what you might (or might not) come back to. I’m sorry you’re going through it.
This edition of Enspired should bring a little bit of distraction, learning, and hope as we look to Forbes’s description of eight energy trends for 2025 and how an international E&P company is upping their supercomputing game to expedite oil and gas discoveries. Let’s go.
Sarah Compton
Editor, Enspired
Forbes Forecasts 2025 Energy Trends
Boy Anthony/Shutterstock.com
We all know the energy sector has been experiencing a bit of a shake-up these past several years, and looks like it may continue consolidating, adapting, and evolving in 2025.
The undercurrent I read often—to the surprise of no one—is that AI will have its fingers in all the pies (ahh, pie…a fond holiday memory).
Let’s look at some of the trends Forbes is predicting this year. Note: these trends are interwoven in their own right—improving one often can have positive downstream impacts on others.
Energy infrastructure and management are being brought to the forefront as AI benefactors.
More precise forecasts can impact everything from energy demand management to maintenance schedules and exploration.
Accurate AI analyses can help improve the placement of infrastructure pieces, such as EV charging stations.
Supermajors such as Shell (and the company highlighted in our next story) are using AI to aid in all forms of energy exploration, including green energy.
Decentralized energy production stands to benefit from other forecasted innovations in energy storage, battery technology, and modular nuclear reactors.
Big tech companies are pioneering the way forward for decentralized energy as they acquire their own power sources for data centers, but the idea of smaller-scale micro-grids and energy sharing systems is catching on, too.
AI-powered management systems can help community groups or neighborhoods own and operate their own systems.
Improved energy storage and battery technology, such as solid-state and flow batteries, can help these micro-grids integrate solar, wind, and even tidal energy more reliably, so that rural and remote areas can tap into local resources more efficiently.
Geopolitics and energy inequality is a top priority as local conflicts have increasingly global impacts on access to affordable and reliable energy.
Perhaps the biggest driver is…YOU! Sorry for the added emphasis, but... us geoscientists have the education, skillset, and desire to push the boundaries of technology and deliver increasingly better energy sources.
Register now to join AAPG Academy and Eliis on 28 January at 9am CST for a free webinar to learn more about downscaling seismic and geological interpretation to construct geological and reservoir models.
Expert speakers Nicolas Daynac and Jean-Claude Dulac from Eliis will demonstrate how to:
Use synthetic seismic data from a digitized analogue model alongside real-world basin seismic datasets to show how the Relative Geological Time method enables characterization of depositional sequences at well log resolution
Italian E&P company ENI is upping its exploration game with a supercomputer dubbed the HPC6, which uses nearly 14,000 graphics processing units (GPUs). The company activated the beast on Christmas Day.
The system boasts Cray EX4000 technology and Cray ClusterStor E1000 by HPE.
It has 3,472 computing nodes.
Ninety-six percent of the heat generated is dissipated using a “direct” liquid approach, which hinges on circulating a fluid through a cold-plate heat exchanger located directly on the chip.
Not your average calculator. HPC6 enhances the computational capacity of ENI's Green Data Center in Ferrera Erbognone, increasing its performance nearly 10x—from 70 to 606 million billion mathematical operations per second.
What makes a computer super?
Supercomputers were introduced in the 1960s, and electrical engineer Seymour Cray created the fastest ones for several decades at subsequent companies, many bearing his name or monogram.
To be “super” a computer must have a high level of performance compared to a conventional machine.
Supercomputers’ performance is often measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS). ENI’s new model has a peak of 606 petaflops.
The Cray-1 sported one 64-bit processor at an incredible 80 MHz. Most laptops I have seen hover in the 3.5 to 5 MHz range, though they tend to have many cores with many threads.
Fun fact: A Cray supercomputer occupied a corner of the lab I did my dissertation in. My models were never the size to warrant a run on it, but I frequently warmed my hands behind it when it would fire up.
My experience with geoscientists has been that we generally prefer bigger monitors more than we prefer supercomputers, but no one will scoff at having a fast and powerful machine at their fingertips to help them find and characterize new oil deposits.
HPC6 will be put to work sifting through large amounts of data that is billed as improving exploration efforts, as well as clean energy and decarbonization calculations.
For more information on ENI and HPC6, go here and here.
👍 If you enjoyed this edition of Enspired, consider supporting AAPG's brand of newsletters by forwarding to a friend or colleague and signing up for our other newsletters here.
➡️ Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up for Enspired here.
✉️ To get in touch with Sarah or suggest a topic for Enspired, send an email to editorial@aapg.org.
AAPG thanks our advertisers for their support. Sponsorship has no influence on editorial content. If you're interested in supporting AAPG digital products, reach out to Melissa Roberts.
.png?upscale=true&width=220&upscale=true&name=Sarah-Compton-Headshot-Signature%20(1).png)
