Occidental selects AWS as its preferred cloud provider

Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), has announced that Occidental, an international energy company and carbon management leader, has selected AWS as its preferred cloud provider to drive its digital transformation.

As part of this new multiyear agreement, Occidental will migrate its core production applications and on-premises information technology (IT) infrastructure to AWS to improve operational efficiencies, eliminate upfront capital expenditures, and support the company’s development of systems that will remove carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere, including large-scale direct air capture (DAC) plants, AWS said in a statement.

Occidental will move its production systems and applications, analytics tools, and workflows to AWS to gain a more flexible, scalable, and secure IT infrastructure, the company said. This mass migration will enable the energy provider to use a broad portfolio of cloud services, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for secure and resizable compute capacity and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) for high performance block storage to scale IT resources to meet supply and demand fluctuations in the energy market.

Leveraging AWS analytics and machine learning will help Occidental gain greater insights and automate processes. For example, Occidental will use AWS Lake Formation to help manage its data lakes and break down data silos, bringing new life to historical data. This will allow Occidental to increase efficiencies and extract greater value from operational data, such as improving exploration decision-making times or optimising equipment performance, AWS said.

AWS will also work with Occidental and its subsidiary 1PointFive to develop and design systems architecture for its large-scale direct air capture plants, which will remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. DAC technology uses high-powered fans to draw air into a processing facility where the CO2 is extracted from the air through a series of chemical reactions and then stored in underground reservoirs. DAC is an integral carbon removal technology that’s needed to help the world reduce CO2 emissions. 1PointFive expects its first plant, named “Stratos,” to capture 500,000 metric tons of CO2 from the atmosphere each year, when fully operational—the equivalent of CO2 emissions from more than 111,000 gasoline-powered passenger vehicles per year. Using AWS infrastructure, 1PointFive can analyze real-time DAC performance data to optimize processes and equipment performance for peak efficiency, and also apply learnings for future plants that are each expected to capture 1 million metric tons per year.

 “AWS is helping Occidental digitally transform our operations, and together we are using innovative cloud solutions to drive energy efficiencies and decarbonize the atmosphere,” said Yanni Charalambous, Vice President and Chief Information Officer at Occidental. “Migrating our existing on-premises IT infrastructure to the AWS Cloud will help Occidental reduce infrastructure costs and enhance operational efficiencies, so we can innovate faster to advance our plans to reach net-zero and help others do the same.”

“Reducing carbon emissions, addressing growing energy demand, and ensuring energy security are top priorities for communities and companies across the globe,” said Uwem Ukpong, Vice President of Global Services at AWS. “Occidental is using AWS’s advanced cloud technologies to take on these generational challenges, at scale, by optimising carbon removal technology to hasten the world’s decarbonisation efforts while increasing efficiencies and reducing the carbon footprint associated with energy production. We look forward to working with Occidental to make environmental sustainability and decarbonisation a reality.”