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Commonly accepted data-management practices left insights hidden from view.
Although an industry leader in terms of its decarbonization and net-zero goals, our client was like many energy companies when it came to ESG data strategy, management, and reporting capabilities.
The company relied on highly manual processes to gather, interpret, validate, and reconcile emissions data from disparate sources. That data, spread across multiple states, numerous facilities, and more than a dozen legacy systems, was gathered with the help of third-party consultants. It was ultimately compiled into spreadsheets with dozens of tabs and scores of columns and VLOOKUPs, making the spreadsheets decipherable by only a few people in the company. Validations and controls consisted largely of manual checks for missing or anomalous values.
Limited visibility into the reporting process reduced confidence in the accuracy of reported GHG emissions. Delivering regulatory reports on time was a challenge. It took months, sometimes a year or longer, to prepare one year’s worth of filings, and even with all the time spent and money invested in consultants, the company felt it was not achieving the level of transparency it was seeking.
In addition, because the company was unable to aggregate data across domains (i.e., air quality, water usage, waste, field ops, energy usage, etc.) and unable to perform granular analysis, leadership was deprived of key insights that could validate the effectiveness of current emission-reduction efforts and drive more informed strategic and operational decisions. Leadership was presented with data that was often a month old and had unclear lineage as there was no traceable data path from field operations to final reports.
Existing ESG data capabilities not only made reporting and strategic decision-making more difficult, but it also failed to support the company in the kinds of industry-leading conversations it wanted to facilitate. Conversations around the role of bridge fuels in meeting the energy requirements of expanding populations and economies. And the need for transparency into the impact of energy production on the environment and communities, along with ways to mitigate and balance those impacts through initiatives that create real, measurable differences that contribute to the health of communities and the planet.
Company leadership determined that they needed to get to a point where they were as timely, accurate, and robust in their ESG data as they were in their financial data. And they needed to get there fast.
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A steady supply of insights powers an ambitious ESG strategy.
Just six months after the company decided to implement and automate their emissions data collection, processing, and reporting on a Microsoft Azure infrastructure, the executive responsible for Regulatory Reporting logged into the new platform for the first time. He quickly discovered that he could view CO2, CH4, and N20 emission volumes aggregated by time period, location, region, and equipment category. He found he could access near-real-time data related to an individual well pad—from equipment and activities to production, water usage, waste, and emissions. He checked methane intensity scores for a single well and then compared them across all wells. He explored predictive models that alert the company to potential equipment leaks before they happen.
Knowing that the data he was viewing has been pulled directly from each facility across multiple states and put through a series of validations and controls, helped him begin to trust the data. As he continued pulling up dashboards and drilling down into visualizations, his teammates overheard him repeating a single phrase that captured what it’s like to suddenly see your company’s ESG performance come this sharply into focus: “This is so cool.”
The reaction to this level of automation was the same across the company as team members gained access and logged on. All the while, the platform was busily ingesting, integrating, and analyzing data from over 14 legacy applications and numerous classes, drawing from 4,400 wells and over 3,000 miles of pipeline. People freed from manually wrangling data invested more time in studying what the data was saying—ranging from which emission reduction efforts are proving most effective, to which wells are most efficient in their water usage, to energy production ratios. Perhaps nothing speaks more to the trust the company had in its data, than the fact that it began linking executive compensation to progress toward the company’s sustainability goals.
When it came time for regulatory filings, the team looked forward to what their new environmental data hub could do, and they weren’t disappointed. While past filings had taken many months, the hub helped complete the process in less than one.
Better data gives this natural gas company the ability to be accountable, transparent, and ambitious in its ESG ambitions; prompt and complete in its regulatory reporting; and responsive to the customers, investors, employees, and communities.
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As ESG ambitions continue to grow, this platform grows along with them.
As common ESG metrics and reporting frameworks change, companies that invest in the infrastructure to accurately measure, monitor, and report sustainability data will be better positioned than competitors to respond to regulatory uncertainty. Our natural gas client’s platform built on Microsoft Azure will give it the capabilities and flexibility to align its data strategy, management, and reporting to meet ESG reporting requirements, pursue new ESG goals, and build stakeholder trust in a changing, healthier world.
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