The goal of our upcoming book, Sustainable Oil and Gas with Blockchain, is to help the oil and gas industry, its investors, customers, regulators, and the general public understand how the oil and gas industry could achieve a financially and environmentally sustainable future in the world of climate change.
First things first: I’m not from the oil and gas industry. I’m an open source developer with a background as an investment fund manager. More recently, while working on carbon accounting as part of Hyperledger, I met Dr. Soheil Saraji, who runs the Hydrocarbon Labs at the University of Wyoming. We started working on a white paper about blockchain and Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS), when Soheil suggested we expand it into a book. Not having written a book before, I said “Sure! Let’s do it.”
The result is this book — The result of a yearlong collaboration with contributors from around the world on topics from CCS to Sustainable Aviation Fuels and Hydrogen to methane reduction and even sustainable plastics and carbon markets.
Through working on this book, I learned three very important things about the oil and gas industry and climate change:
1. What The Oil and Gas Industry Does is Critical for Climate Change
The oil and gas industry is HUGE. Most people don’t realize how big it actually is, so take a look at this chart:
Every year, we’re investing nearly $1 trillion in fossil fuels. Where is it going? Will that be in coal or natural gas? Carbon capture or carbon offsets?
Clearly, if we want to fix the climate, we’d better get this right.
2. The industry is looking at climate change seriously.
People we’ve met in the oil and gas industry know that climate change is happening, and they know something must be done about it. They also have a tremendous amount of expertise about everything from energy to geology, not to mention tremendous amount of capital, that could help fix it.
We need them to help us fix climate change together.
3. The challenge is: How do we do this?
Can the oil and gas industry solve the climate problem while continuing as an industry?
We believe the answer is Yes.
Far from being the end of the oil and gas industry, the climate problem presents a whole new set of opportunities for the industry. How this actually happens, and what role the new blockchain/web3/distributed ledger technologies could play in it, is the topic of our book.
If you’re from outside the industry, we hope it will help you see the role of the oil and gas industry in solving the climate problem and help them get there.
If you’re in the oil and gas industry, we hope it will help guide you on the path to an environmentally and financially sustainable business model.