In July, Tony Dupuy and the other founders of Lafayette-based Forged Energy Solutions posed an interesting question: Why not fabricate the data center components modularly and place them on abandoned oil platforms in the Gulf?
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In turn, the data center would be powered by turbines on a separate platform using existing offshore gas leases for fuel. Seawater would be used for cooling the data center components and existing underground cables to transfer the data.
We’re talking with lease owners to find underutilized gas resources that are still out there, whether on the shelf or further out,” Dupuy says. “It only takes about 250,000 cubic feet of natural gas to create 1 megawatt of power with a good turbine, and in some of these places there are some 9 million cubic feet of gas available.
“And if four years down the road a field starts to deplete, we’ll just disconnect and move everything to a new field.”
Dupuy acknowleges that steep challenges exist when moving any operation from land to offshore, “but I think we could successfully meld the two worlds together. You could rework the infrastructure and have these same oil crews work both the tech side and the oil and gas side … and develop a new industry in Louisiana.”
As designers of the proposed system, Forged Energy Solutions believes the state should consider using existing offshore assets, energy resources and decades of operational experience to complement future infrastructure needs while saving the communities and landscapes from a proliferation of land-based data centers.
“There’s just a significant opportunity here,” he adds, “to develop this system, put it in place and let it go.”
