Italian Oil Giant Launches Fifth-Fastest Supercomputer on Earth. What It’s For Will Not Shock You in the Slightest.
Photo by Extinction Rebellion Italia/Wikimedia Commons
The Italian oil and gas company Eni switched on its new HPC6 supercomputer on Christmas Day. The computer, which involves thousands of processing units working in tandem to conduct 600 quadrillion mathematical operations per second, is the fifth-fastest such machine on the planet. And they’re going to use it to, uh, find more oil.
“We have used the supercomputer in all of our latest discoveries,” said Lorenzo Fiorillo, the head of Eni’s research and digital department, according to the Financial Times. The company has built previous versions of the new machine to help sift through mountains of geologic and other data, an effort to find new and untapped oil and gas reservoirs. HPC6 will just make them better at it. “We were able to find oil in places where we saw nothing.”
Eni’s new climate apocalypse toy cost more than $100 million — pocket change to a company that can pull in tens of billions in profit per year. On its website, the company played up the supercomputer’s role in reducing emissions rather than raising them: “Innovation and the constant evolution of technologies are fundamental to maintaining and strengthening Eni’s leadership in the energy transition,” the company’s CEO Claudio Descalzi said in a statement. “Technological advancements allow us to use energy more efficiently by reducing emissions and promoting the development of new energy solutions.”
And sure, why not — the supercomputer could well contribute to an oil company’s forays into renewables. But that’s definitely not the main point, not when a top-20 oil and gas producer feels totally fine sending an exec out to tell the Financial Times about how great they’re going to do at finding new oil and gas reserves — a thing that, again, the world is not supposed to be doing anymore. Some analyses suggest that Eni’s oil and gas output will plateau between now and 2030; those 600 quadrillion calculations per second may have something to say about that.