The writing is on the wall. Every major global governmental agency is warning of the imminent tipping point towards catastrophic climate change, even the world's largest oil company Saudi Aramco is now talking about reaching peak oil within the next 20 years, and the International Energy Agency projects that it will happen in more like 10. Solar and wind are cheaper than ever, and large-scale solar mega-projects are quickly becoming the norm. It makes sense, then, that even the supermajor oil companies are diversifying their portfolios and investing in their own demise--also known as the renewable energy sector. Way back in July, 2017 Oilprice reported that France's Total S.A. was "leading the charge on renewables". At the time, Total's website boasted: "For Total, contributing to the development of renewable energies is as much a strategic choice as an industrial responsibility. We are doing our part to diversify the global energy mix by investing in renewables, with a strategic focus on solar energy and bioenergies."

The writing is on the wall. Every major global governmental agency is warning of the imminent tipping point towards catastrophic climate change, even the world's largest oil company Saudi Aramco is now talking about reaching peak oil within the next 20 years, and the International Energy Agency projects that it will happen in more like 10. Solar and wind are cheaper than ever, and large-scale solar mega-projects are quickly becoming the norm. It makes sense, then, that even the supermajor oil companies are diversifying their portfolios and investing in their own demise--also known as the renewable energy sector. Way back in July, 2017 Oilprice reported that France's Total S.A. was "leading the charge on renewables". At the time, Total's website boasted: "For Total, contributing to the development of renewable energies is as much a strategic choice as an industrial responsibility. We are doing our part to diversify the global energy mix by investing in renewables, with a strategic focus on solar energy and bioenergies."

Attitudes about nuclear energy are changing, with pundits on both sides of the aisle touting its benefits for extremely efficient and relatively clean energy. Despite an ever more positive public opinion, the nuclear industry in the United States, the largest in the world, is currently experiencing a downturn, even going so far as to need government subsidies to keep afloat. In fact, at present the fastest growing sector of the nuclear industry is profiting not off of growth, but off of the nuclear sector's slow death in the United States. According to reporting by Bloomberg, "the fastest growing part of the nuclear industry in the U.S. involves a small but expanding group of companies that specialize in tearing reactors down faster and cheaper than ever before." Tearing down old nuclear reactors is no easy feat, however.

The oil price crash of 2014 and the global'digitalization and disruption' drive coincided in a rather bizarre way to push the oil industry to seek cost cuts through innovation and new technologies. Big Tech was only too pleased to help Big Oil, seeing a new revenue stream in an industry long thought to be of the'dinosaur' type that was too slow to embrace new ways of doing things. Many oil and gas firms, especially the world's biggest, are already using data analytics, cloud computing, digital oil fields, digital twins, robotics, automation, predictive maintenance, machine learning, and even AI. The technology giants have seized the opportunity to sell such services to Big Oil, and top managers at Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and ABB Group, to name a few, flocked to this week's top energy industry event CERAWeek by IHS Markit in Houston to pitch their solutions to a wider audience. "A great wave of innovation and technology is transforming the industry and reshaping the energy future," said Daniel Yergin, conference chair and vice chairman of IHS Markit.

After a slow start, the oil and gas industry seems to be eager to adopt all sorts of digital technology as they help companies keep costs lower while boosting efficiency. Artificial intelligence is being flaunted as the answer to all problems or, at least, a better answer to many problems than older approaches. First of all, it needs to be said that a lot of the people who talk about AI enthusiastically do not mean artificial intelligence literally, as in an autonomous system capable of making decisions on its own. What they most commonly mean is predictive and analytic algorithms, and the process that allows for the deployment in a huge variety of tasks in the upstream industry: machine learning. While the hype is considerable, it's not all without merit.

The oil industry has fallen hard for digital tech, with artificial intelligence and robotics a particular focus of attraction, KPMG's latest CEO Outlook: Oil & Gas has suggested. As much as 85 percent of respondents--52 global chief executives from the oil and gas industry--told KPMG that they have either already adopted AI in their operations or are in the process of testing it for adoption. What's more, a high percentage of the respondents believe that this increased adoption of digital technology solutions will actually create more jobs. Oil and gas companies' excitement about technology is not exactly new, but it is intensifying. After years of shunning suspiciously unfamiliar, possibly dangerous alternatives to the way business in the industry has been done for decades, oil and gas producers are now eager to enter the new digital age and reap as many benefits from it as possible.

The U.S. automaker says it'll deploy its self-driving vehicles on Lyft's network within four years. As Fred Katayama reports, this expands Lyft's partnerships beyond Google and GM.

While the oil and gas industry has had its share of ups and downs over the past decade, many financial institutions are banking on a very slow growth of oil prices in 2017. Though some believe that the efficiency gains that the oil industry can capture are quickly coming to an end, this sentiment is only capturing hard technology specifically related to oil and gas. To help bring the O&G industry to the 21st century, technology from other industries needs to be incorporated, using many hard-earned years of expertise and different lines of thinking. Oilprice previously mentioned incorporating food industry technology to increase safety standards when fracking, but incorporating technology from the IT industry is something that the O&G industry as a whole can benefit from. Whether its neural networks, machine learning, fuzzy logic, case-based reasoning or expert systems, AI has the potential to transform the industry.

As the world begins to turn away from fossil fuels and depend increasingly on renewable resources, the energy sector is presented with a problem. Renewables are simply not as reliable as oil and gas, as they are largely dependent on weather conditions such as sunny skies and windy days. In a world where we become fully dependent on renewables, there is concern that supply may not always be able to meet demand. This supply problem is compounded with the complications of individuals, businesses, and municipalities becoming small-scale energy producers themselves by way of solar panels and individual storage units connected to the grid. These producer-consumers, having varying and unpredictable patterns of individual production and consumption create instability on shared grids.