Harnessing flare gas to power modular data centres

Norway headquartered Earth Wind & Power is investigating flare gas utilisation for power in Indonesia and Nigeria.

Flare gas and excess power from solar, wind and other renewable technologies that would otherwise go to waste in locations around the world is in the sights of the Oslo-based startup.

The brainchild of former Norwegian Minister of National Public Security and Deputy Minister of Petroleum and Energy, Ingvil Smines Tybring-Gjedde, the CEO and a co-founder, the company seeks to position mobile data centres at such sites to exploit that power and provide an ESG solution and potential extra revenue stream to the project owner.

Two countries currently in the sights are Nigeria and Indonesia, with feasibility studies for flare gas utilisation set to be undertaken.

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As a first step, in Nigeria, in a collaboration with the Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission (NUPRC), letters of Introduction have been provided to the Nigerian Petroleum Development Company Limited (NPDC) and Esso Exploration and Production Nigeria Limited.

In Indonesia, an alliance is being entered into with the national oil and gas company PT Pertamina EP for the potential deployment of the modular data centre infrastructure at locations within PEP’s Zone 7 working area on-shore Indonesia.

“Africa, and Nigeria in particular, is a key market for us, and we are excited to collaborate on a project that supports the elimination of routine flaring while simultaneously contributing to improved power utilisation,” says Tybring-Gjedde of the Nigeria initiative, the first of several in the pipeline in Africa.

Of the Pertamina EP collaboration, she says it “marks another important milestone on Earth Wind & Power’s mission to deploy our powerful ESG solution to tackle the ongoing challenges of wasted energy and the environmental impact of gas flaring”.

Earth Wind & Power’s standard high power computing blockchain module comprises a high density data centre container with closed-loop water cooling that is modular and stackable.

The 1.8MW unit, developed in partnership with German data centre specialist Cloud&Heat Technologies and Netherlands-based Bitfury, includes 144 integrated servers in a 12m container. Its design is intended to enable use in even the most extreme climatic conditions, with outside temperatures from -30 °C to 48 °C

An interface for waste heat utilisation is included to enable further potential energy efficiency improvements.

Key considerations for the type of data centre services that can be offered include the power uptime and the local connectivity.

Earth Wind & Power states the emissions impacts from its standard unit utilised in a 5MW centre recovering 1.5MMSCFD (42,378m3/day) of flare gas include close to 100% reductions in none-combusted methane and none-combusted volatile organic compounds and reductions of CO to a level of 15ppm and NOx to a level of 9ppm.