3 Blockchain Disruptions in the Energy Industry

Stay ahead of the industry with exclusive feature stories on the top companies, expert insights and the latest news delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe today.

The breakthrough trust mechanism, blockchain, is enabling transparency, coordination, and information sharing across the energy industry. 

FREMONT, CA: In its ongoing journey to help the world, the energy industry has faced several challenges that have been addressed through the implementation of groundbreaking technologies. The result of this transition is a technology-rich industry landscape. With emerging digital innovations, the industry is in need of addressing the fundamental issues of security and trust, which are the basic requirements of doing business. Given that, the industry now proves itself as a fertile ground for the introduction of blockchain technology. Here is a closer look at specific use cases that exemplifies the potential for blockchain in the energy industry.

Energy Trading

One of the obvious uses of blockchain technology is to provide a reliable and efficient platform for executing and recording transactions. With blockchain, energy trading can be recorded and settled almost instantly, with no need for an intermediary with or no need for reconciliation. Blockchain’s suitability as a reliable trading platform could be applied to both physical and digital trading across energy commodities.

Regulatory Reporting and Compliance

Regulators are increasingly demanding energy companies to provide a huge volume of data that can be analyzed to identify noncompliance and other regulatory issues. Gathering and cleaning up this data is a daunting task. Blockchain could potentially ease this challenge by providing transparency and allowing regulators to securely access, clean, and tamper-proof data while allowing firms to access it.

Global Supply Network

The end-to-end process of getting hydrocarbon out of the ground, converting it into a usable form, and then providing it to customers involves numerous steps and many stakeholders, from major energy firms to government authorities to individual service providers. This will make the systems and information to support all of these steps highly disjointed and siloed, making it hard to get a comprehensive view. The blockchain platform could be used to support the entire end-to-end process. It provides real-time speed and efficiency, reliability, and transparency to allow companies to share information on a common platform securely.

Blockchain has tremendous potential to enhance efficiency and effectiveness, creating value for the energy industry. Capturing the full benefits could help energy firms thrive in the global market.