Helping The Environment Recover With Data Science

 After the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, a question that came up frequently was – how long would it be before the environment recovered? This was a concern both for the ocean surrounding the spill area as well as the marshes and beaches inland where the oil washed up.

Not all spills are as bad as the Deepwater Horizon one – but a concern that comes up repeatedly when anything needs to be extracted from the Earth is – what is the impact on the local environment and how long will it take for it to recover or at least return to a state as close to the original one as possible?This is true whether it’s minerals being extracted or gold or oil and natural gas.

The recovery of land after oil and gas wells have been drilled is a question that has been studied for quite a while now. In general, most of the work has looked at individual sites and evaluated how they are doing after the extraction is complete and the system has been shut down, but there are very few studies that have been able to look at what’s happening at a larger spatial scale.

Enter satellite data, machine learning and all the lovely new tools that data science brings. A study recently completed by US Geological Survey (USGS) used satellite data to understand what was happening at abandoned oil and gas sites in the arid US Southwest. The scientists used data from NASA’s Landsat satellite to develop an index that measured the vegetation adjusted for the soil and compared areas with similar soils, topography and geology. They then used a statistical algorithm to identify the sites that were recovering at a slower pace than the others and tried to isolate the factors that could be causing the slow recovery.

What’s fascinating about this type of work is that it isn’t something that springs to mind when you think about cleantech. However, helping the environment recover is very much a “green” endeavor. And companies do it for multiple reasons – not just because environmental recovery and cleanup are mandated by governments around the world. It helps companies improve their sustainability bottom line, it’s good for building relationships with the community where the work is taking place and most of all it helps to attract talent that wants to do good as well as earn money. Chevron, BP, Saudi Aramco, Shell – all the major players in the oil and gas industry also have jobs where the focus is entirely on helping the environment recover.

What our community are reading

Moonshots, Models, IoT and Machine Learning in Agriculture

  What do Google, Climate Corporation, early stage startups in farm robotics, and researchers trying to figure out how to feed the world sustainably have in common? They’re all grappling with one of the toughest challenges of working with natural systems - how do you work with data that is sparse, unevenly distributed and with systems that have so many connections and interactions with other systems?     Before the advent of cheap sensors that are connected to phones, easily accessible satellite data and drones that can fly over fields quickly and inexpensively -     scientists in companies and academia worked on developing plant and crop models that incorporated as many aspects of the farm and as much data as was available so that they could understand and predict what was likely to happen on the field. Understandably, the forecasts took some time to produce and as the models grew more complex, issues about how to estimate model parameters and the uncertainty a...
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Our online community space is now live!

 Our online community space is now open to anyone who has signed up for a free or paid course on our website! In addition to everyone who signed up for our cohort-based courses, we're now expanding it to all the members of our community. If you've already signed up for any of our courses, check your email for the invitation for the space. It's where we'll get together to talk about all things data science and clean technology related, discuss the latest research, network and make connections with other professionals in the sector. It's an invitation only , no bots and no trolls allowed space - so come on over! Here's where you can check out our courses and join our community !
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State of the market update - players, funding, jobs and more

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If you are working in the high-tech sector or are at a startup, the first half of 2023 was definitely a roller coaster. We saw venture funding dry up for many sectors; saw the collapse of the Silicon Valley Bank - the bank where many startups and venture capital funds kept their money; and observed layoffs happen in the technology giants - Google, Facebook, Apple and others. In fact, one of the VC firms, Cervin, did an analysis showing that venture funding has been at an all-time low this year, with only 19 mega deals being signed in Q1 2023 compared to 98 the previous year; funding fell by 53% for angel and seed funding and by 30% for Series A rounds. In fact, except for companies focusing on generative AI and AI adjacent technology in the high-tech sector, it has been an exceptionally difficult year financially. How did the clean-tech sector fare? Unsurprisingly, while there were some impacts on startups and their ability to raise additional funds from venture capital firms, the se...
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