out in avalanches, and how to rescue your colleagues.” From there she got involved in rope access: “I was doing maintenance on bridges. Instead of using scaffolding, we said we can do it with ropes - and we can do it in like 10 minutes instead of building this scaffolding.” “I started a company, called in Norwegian Ut-veg, It's directly translated as ‘a way out’, but a way out is also a way into something new, out of the house and into nature.” At this point, her attention turned to oil and she began working within the Norwegian oil industry, not against it.
Peter Judge Global Editor
Flaring for the world We talk to the former Norwegian politician who wants to make sure that energy doesn’t get wasted
I
ngvil Smines Tybring-Gjedde is a puzzle. She’s proud of her environmental credentials - but she’s had a career in the petroleum industry, and even represented it in the Norwegian government. She’s entered the data center world as the CEO of Earth Wind & Power, a company that says it can help with the climate crisis. But EW&P offers fossil-powered data centers running on natural gas burnt at oil wells. All that takes some explaining, but she says it all comes down to efficiency, getting off your high horse, and “looking at the facts.”
A climber “I started out hating the [petroleum] industry,” she tells us over Zoom. “I was a professional climber, and I loved the outdoor life. I didn't want people to have any footprint. I was really eager to stop the oil and gas industry. I was on the outside, and I only saw the negative part of it.” Climbing was how she started, and it’s clearly still in her bones. Each step of her career she’s found the next handhold, and tested it before transferring her weight. As a climbing instructor, she taught soldiers “how to survive, how not to be taken
24 DCD Magazine • datacenterdynamics.com
Climbing onto oil rigs Around 1990, Smines Tybring-Gjedde noticed something. Across the North Sea, oil rigs in the British oil fields were using climbers. “There were actually British climbers on the British [continental] shelf,” she says, “and we thought, if they can do it on the British shelf, we should do it on the Norwegian shelf instead of scaffolding.” She pioneered rope access on Norway’s oil rigs, starting with a job request to change some bolts on an onshore oil rig. “I said yes, I can do it,” she tells us, but before she could take the job, she had to get approval. Statoil could not give her a permit for rope access on their oil rigs, “so I traveled to Scotland and got two certificates there.” Back in Norway, she became a rope access entrepreneur: “I got a job painting the legs of a platform offshore. It was a test. So I climbed down to do the sandblasting and painting, and they used a scaffolding company on the other legs. “And you know, my team was finished with the whole work before the scaffoldings were built. It was quite a nice job, we got a lot of money, and I still liked being a climber.” After that, she alternated climbing mountains round the world, with earning money on oil rigs to fund the expeditions. Gradually her opinion of the industry changed.: “I saw that the oil and gas industry was very eager to reduce its footprint in the environment. So, from not liking it at all, I had a huge transition. I saw that the people working there and the industry as a whole did have some very good morals or ethics - or the needs of doing a good job.” Fueling global warming In the big picture, there is plenty to dislike about Norwegian oil. The country has a large, nationalized petroleum industry, which is undeniably fuelling global warming. It supplies roughly two percent of the oil burnt worldwide. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s recent report, and subsequent studies have found that the only way to hit our
