Shifting away from the UK helped Shearwater GeoServices adopt green energy for low-cost, clean seismic processing.
Article by ITPro — published 24 Jan 2024
As companies strive to meet sustainability goals across their operations and cut energy bills, the option of migrating assets to cheaper and greener regions is becoming increasingly appealing.
Shearwater GeoServices is a seismic acquisition and processing firm, working primarily with the oil and gas industry to produce seismic surveys of rocks under the seabed. In late 2021, as it looked to expand its operations while chasing lower energy prices and more sustainable operations, Shearwater began a project to migrate its workloads and equipment to the Icelandic data center services company atNorth.
“I would say that we’ve made savings of around 85%. The hosting is about 50% or maybe 40% cheaper, but the rest of the cost – the electricity – is literally more than 90% cheaper,” says Nick Riddalls, hemispheric Head of Processing at Shearwater.
Shearwater operates 24 large vessels in waters around the world, each of which captures almost 1TB of data per day. This data is treated with approximately 50 processes to remove noise and prepare it for data analytics – an intensive process that requires serious computing power. They were seeking a more collaborative, low-cost solution for Shearwater’s existing workloads and laying the groundwork for a larger on-prem footprint for the future.
This led the firm to atNorth, which uses a number of Iceland’s unique selling points to offer low-cost, green data operations. Iceland sources virtually 100% of its energy from renewable sources, with around 73% coming from hydropower and 27% from geothermal power according to data from the Government of Iceland. This has driven energy prices down in Iceland and protected it from the energy crisis while also giving firms a guarantee that energy consumed in Iceland has been produced sustainably.
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