E4 Themes

1. Electrification

Key Areas of Interest

Electrification can increase and accelerate renewable energy penetration. Opportunities in the energy system are many and we are specifically interested in areas below.

Technology Innovations:

• Renewable Electricity Integration and Distributed Energy Management:
  • Tools to configure combination of Renewable energy, Thermal, and Storage plant with the ability to manage loads and variability of a hybrid plant
  • Peak/Off-peak demand-side management using storage with grid-connected renewables
  • Power dispatch management based on pricing and peak/off-peak demand 

Business Models/Services:

• Energy Forecasting & Trading:
  • Tools that provide country-level or regional level overview about grid maps, grid availability network plans, power markets, supply and demand over time

2. Renewables

Key Areas of Interest

New energy business opportunities to help customers better manage their energy needs and bring power to remote communities.

Technology Innovations:

• New battery materials/chemistry for Energy storage such as Metal-hydrogen, Metal air, Zinc based, etc.
• Water Electrolysis/Water Splitting for H2 generation
• Liquid and gas biofuels from waste, plants

Infrastructure Development:

• Solar with variants on concentrated solar power systems for large farms.
• Bio-CNG Plants
• H2 as a transport fuel
• LNG Transportation, Hydrogen Transportation

3. Circularity

Key Areas of Interest

Waste reduction solutions enabling the energy transition by reducing, reusing and repurposing waste in operations, supply chain or innovating waste to energy solutions.

Technology Innovations:

• Circular solutions for construction materials
• Substitutes for construction materials
• Technologies to convert pyrolysis-based fuel to chemicals
• Technologies to convert plastic waste to fuel

Business Models/Services:

• Waste Processing, segregation, and recycling
• Lubricant reuse/recycling such as onsite cleaning of lubricants

4. Digital

Key Areas of Interest

Solutions to reduce operational/ capital expenditure by improving the reliability, productivity and safety of operations and assets; connecting customers with new business models for mobility and energy services enabled by digital technologies and the decentralization of energy systems.

Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning:

• Use of satellite imaging and artificial intelligence to identify carbon sinks
• Application of AI techniques to estimate real-time construction progress
• Machine Vision and AI application for image analysis to detect methane leaks detection, thermal imaging of furnace
• Physics constrained Artificial Intelligence
• Applications of GANs (Generative Adversarial Network) and VAEs (Variational Autoencoder) for generative modeling in subsurface environment.
• Machine learning/Artificial Intelligence for Upstream/subsurface applications to accelerate computation

Internet of Things

• IoT and automation for manufacturing with sensors and data collection at industrial scale, real-time optimization of energy consumption and carbon footprint
• Emissions monitoring platforms with IoT based data reporting (Green House Gas, inventories, methane) and tracking at the asset level

Predictive Maintenance

• Noninvasive sensing like the use of electromagnetics and analytics for anomaly detection
• Data Analytics to estimate the remaining useful life of critical components like Compressors, Electric drives, etc.
• Digital Platforms for reliability services like automotive service aggregators

Natural Language Processing

• Application of NLP (Natural Language Processing) for scenarios like flight shamming
• Conversion of unstructured to structured data and labeling techniques

Digitalization of Assets

• 3D Asset Reconstruction like Laser Scanning, Photogrammetry
• Digital Twin
• Construction Progress 4D visualization
• Real-time construction productivity monitoring and intervention

5. Decarbonization

Key Areas of Interest

New technology developments and business models to drive low carbon business and consumer choices and opportunities. We are interested in areas around

Technology Innovations:

• Carbon Capture, Utilization, and Storage such as direct air capture, CO2 utilization
• Solution to reduce flaring gas in assets
• Waste heat recovery to improve industrial site energy efficiency.
• Fugitive emissions monitoring from pipelines and facilities

6. Future of Mobility:

Key Areas of Interest

Innovative startups in the mobility space aspiring to bring forward disruptive technologies, business models and differentiated offerings.

Technology Innovations:

• Freight optimization
• Technologies for driver safety
• Electric mobility-related battery technology such as Metal-hydrogen

Business Models/Services:

• Market place for drivers and safety solutions
• Battery Swapping
• Intercity transportation
• First & Last mile connectivity
• Heavy Trucking and InterCity Passenger Movement
• Vehicle Service Aggregator
• Road Tolling, Smart Parking, Road Safety

Infrastructure Development:

• EV Charging / Battery Swapping
• Vehicle Retrofitting Solutions

7. Retail

Key Areas of Interest

Mobility retail today is about being committed to customers - excelling their expectations and delivering highly differentiated marketing program and very active portfolio management. Startups innovating in the following are suited for the domain.

Technology Innovations:

• Predictive Analytics to provide real-time trend analysis and forecast interface by capturing and processing of Point of Sale retail data.
• Utilizing CCTV’s or other recording options for On-shelf availability checks at Retail stores and alerting store personnel for triggering replenishment
• Video and Imaging techniques for Customer Journey mapping, behavioral insights to driver Non-Fuel Revenues at Shell Retail sites.
• Video and Imaging techniques for Vehicle/Brand, Model, Year and plate recognition and Vehicle-fuel matching for vehicles entering at Shell Retail outlets.
• Retail network planning and optimization
• New business models in Retail for fuel delivery.

Infrastructure Development:

• Non-Fuel retail services like car wash, tire replace and service aggregation.

Business Models/Services:

• SaaS Platform based players that enable click & collect Parcel return operations at Shell sites, where the software should be able to connect with Retailers (e.g. Fashion retailers) and logistic providers and provide end-to-end tracking for customers