Rebecca Hofmann is Chairman of the Blockchain for Energy Consortium (previously known as OOC Oil and Gas Blockchain Consortium) a collaborative effort of 10 major energy companies to learn, lead and leverage blockchain technology for the energy industry. Additionally, Rebecca is Head of Innovation at Equinor, a Norwegian based global energy company operating in 30 countries, where she focuses on the strategy and innovations dealing with blockchain technology.

 

What is blockchain?

Rebecca looks at blockchain from a business perspective as a back-end technology, with the potential to truly transform how we work. It's a shared digital ledger, that is allowing to have a more seamless way of working with a central source of truth in which business activity can be self-executed, recorded in real time, in a transparent way, with no central point of failure, that's making it more secure.

 

Challenges of the Energy Industry

The energy industry has been facing challenges like never before. There has been extreme price fluctuations in a negative way affecting all of the entire industry. This situation has stimulated the industry to work in a new way and to embrace digitalisation to help them achieve that.

Source: Statista 2020

Low energy prices, the threat of companies having to either merge or actually go out of business has helped the industry to push digitalization in a way it would have been uncomfortable doing in the past.

Additionally, it has pushed the industry to collaborate even further to share the cost of R&D, share the cost of development, share the risk and share subject matter experts to create the right solution that all the companies need.

 

Rebecca’s journey into blockchain

Rebecca’s journey into blockchain started off when a colleague of hers at Equinor gave her his ticket to attend a conference at Rice University on this new emerging technology called blockchain. During the conference, Rebecca rapidly realised that this technology was about a collaborative tool that also enabled interacting with external parties.

She wrote an email up the chain at Equinor expressing the need to pay attention to blockchain technology and she wanted to be part of it. Equinor already had started some blockchain initiatives and she was able to bring them together into her team as Head of Innovation.

 

Journey to launching the Blockchain for Energy Consortium

In December 2017, Equinor alongside BP, Shell, ABN AMRO, ING, Société Générale and others launched VAKT a commodity post trade management company. Rebecca describes VAKT as the first real blockchain solution to enter the energy industry in Europe, from which they have gained a lot of learnings from.

After Rebecca’s participation at the blockchain conference at Rice University, representatives from Exxon Mobile and Chevron reached out to her to discuss how they could keep discussing about blockchain as a group of three. As the three of them kept meeting others started joining in and participating in the conversation. As the number of participants grew they decided to formerly start a forum called the US Oil and Gas Blockchain Forum in February 2018.

They met across the year and it rapidly grew to 17 operators. The operators were starting to open up to the idea of collaboration and agreeing t...