The Digital Architects: How Leveraging AI is De-risking Our Clean Energy Future

This article is written based on an interview with Allyson Anderson Book, Chief Sustainability Officer at Baker Hughes

The global energy transition isn’t just about grand visions of net-zero targets and sweeping industrial change. Beneath the headlines, it’s a battle against immense technical complexity and daunting financial risk. For technologists and sustainability advocates, the real challenge lies in building the tools to make that vision a reality.

How do you guarantee that captured carbon will stay buried for a millennium? How do you drill miles into the Earth’s crust with pinpoint accuracy to tap its heat? These are the pragmatic, high-stakes challenges that must be solved. Enter Baker Hughes, a company leveraging its industrial legacy to develop a digital toolkit. They’re showing how AI is quietly becoming the essential architect of a cleaner energy world, tackling these pragmatic, high-stakes challenges head-on.

Solving the Carbon Capture Conundrum

One of the most promising yet perilous technologies in the climate fight is Carbon Capture, Utilization, and Storage (CCUS). The concept of capturing CO₂ and storing it underground is powerful, but its success hinges on one critical question: can we ensure it stays there securely? A leak would not only negate the environmental benefit but could undermine the entire multi-billion-dollar investment.

This is where AI is proving indispensable as a tool for risk management. Baker Hughes, for instance, has developed CarbonEdge™, a digital platform that acts as a central nervous system for CCUS projects. It provides an end-to-end, real-time view of the entire operation, from the point of capture through to the subsurface reservoir.

This AI-enabled approach allows operators to constantly monitor CO₂ flows, identify potential risks before they escalate, and ensure the long-term integrity of the storage site. In our interview, Allyson Anderson Book, Chief Sustainability Officer at Baker Hughes, emphasised the importance of this total visibility.

By transforming a geological uncertainty into a data-driven, manageable process, such digital solutions are building the trust and security needed for CCUS to become a viable, large-scale climate tool.

Precision Engineering for Earth’s Natural Power

The same data-first approach is unlocking other clean energy sources, particularly geothermal. Tapping into the Earth’s natural heat offers a source of constant, reliable renewable power—a key advantage over intermittent sources like wind and solar. However, the challenge has always been the high-risk, high-cost exploratory drilling required to find and access it.

Here again, technology is paving the way. Companies like Baker Hughes are applying their deep subsurface expertise, now supercharged with AI, to model underground geology with incredible precision.

The Power of Immediate Gains Through Efficiency

While pioneering new energy frontiers is critical, there’s an enormous, immediate opportunity to reduce emissions by making our current systems more efficient. The International Energy Agency has estimated that a mere 10% increase in the efficiency of today’s oil and gas operations could save around 500,000 tons of CO₂ annually.

This is the low-hanging fruit of decarbonization, and AI is the key to harvesting it. Digital solutions, such as the Carbon Optimizer from Baker Hughes, are already delivering results. In one instance, this technology was used to upgrade turbogenerator systems for the energy company AkerBP in Norway, helping them achieve up to a 7% annual CO₂ reduction from that system alone.

This is the pragmatic power of AI in action—not as a far-off futuristic concept, but as a tool delivering measurable emissions reductions today. The long-term vision is even more ambitious, aiming for fully integrated and automated energy systems.

The journey to a net-zero future is daunting. Yet, away from the headlines, a quiet revolution is happening. AI and data science are providing the essential intelligence needed to de-risk massive clean energy investments, unlock new resources, and slash emissions from existing infrastructure.

It is not a silver bullet, but it is a critical enabler. By transforming uncertainty into predictable data and risk into manageable variables, technology is building the practical foundation upon which a sustainable energy future can be reliably built. The work of companies like Baker Hughes shows that the architects of this future will be those who can master not just energy, but information itself.

This article is written based on an interview with Allyson Anderson Book, Chief Sustainability Officer at Baker Hughes