Thursday 18 / April / 2024
Muscat: GlassPoint Solar, the leading supplier of solar energy to the oil and gas industry, announced on Monday it has been named as one of the World Economic Forum’s (WEF’s) Technology Pioneers, a selection of the world’s most innovative companies.
GlassPoint was selected by an expert committee for its development of a solar energy solution that delivers low-cost steam used to produce crude oil more sustainably and economically.
“It is an honour to be recognised and included alongside some of the most innovative companies in the world. This recognition further substantiates the increasing convergence between traditional and renewable energy. Our solar technology was specifically designed to meet the needs of one of the world’s largest consumers of energy—the oil and gas industry itself,” said GlassPoint President and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Rod MacGregor.
“By integrating alternative energy and traditional energy, the world can benefit from substantial carbon savings while deploying renewable energy at an unprecedented scale,” he added.
WEF’s Technology Pioneers programme was started in 2000 to recognise global companies that can significantly impact business and society through new technologies. GlassPoint was selected from among hundreds of candidates to join a special group of companies with transformative solutions across the IT, health, energy, environment, food and financial services sectors. Previous recipients of the honour include Google, Twitter, SoundCloud and Airbnb.
Technology Pioneers will also participate in the WEF Annual Meeting 2017 in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland.
Fulvia Montresor, head of Technology Pioneers at WEF, said, “We welcome GlassPoint to this extraordinary group of pioneers. They are among a list of companies that are helping to shape the Fourth Industrial Revolution, a technological revolution that will fundamentally alter the way we live, work and relate to one another. Through the platform of the World Economic Forum, they will be able to scale and share their technology in order to achieve a larger impact.”
The company’s solar steam generators harness sunlight to produce steam for the process of extracting heavy oil, replacing natural gas typically burned to generate steam. GlassPoint’s solar oilfield projects are unlocking a tremendous opportunity to deploy solar energy in the global oil and gas industry.
GlassPoint is one of the fastest-growing solar companies in history. In the past five years, GlassPoint has gone from commissioning the world’s first commercial solar enhanced oil recovery (EOR) project to building one of the largest solar projects of any kind. Last year, GlassPoint partnered with Petroleum Development Oman (PDO), the largest producer of oil and gas in Oman, to build Miraah, which will generate in excess of one gigawatt of solar thermal energy.
Once complete, Miraah will reduce emissions by 300,000 tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) each year, the equivalent of removing 63,000 cars from the road. The project will generate 6,000 tons of solar steam each day for oil production, saving 5.6 trillion British Thermal units (BTUs) of natural gas each year. The gas saved can instead be exported as liquefied natural gas (LNG), used for power generation or redirected to the private sector to power new industries and create jobs.
GlassPoint’s unique enclosed trough technology enables the use of lightweight, readily available materials that are a fraction of the cost of alternative technologies. The company’s proven technology demonstrates the massive opportunity available to traditional and renewable energy industries to work together and develop economically viable solutions for today’s energy challenges.
