Energy looks to blockchain for efficiency gains

Distributed ledger technology is key to the next stage in energy management

Energy market participants have long been considered behind the curve in terms of picking up technological advances compared to other industries. Even now, physical oil transactions are settled between fax machines and deliveries of large shipments that have traversed the globe are accompanied by long paper documents. And much has been made of the exploration and production projects that were curtailed in large part thanks to the collapse of the oil price over the past few years; but the tightening of budgets at most energy firms also stretched to research and development initiatives within IT systems. Now, interest has heated up for distributed ledger technology (DLT), with energy companies