**3. Blockchain in energy**

Data aggregation, their reliable distributed storage and possibility of imposing certain business functionality on them are in demand in the energy sector. First of all, the blockchain is used to ensure the decentralization of the energy system. Energy supply contracts can be negotiated directly between producers and consumers, so that both parties have a high degree of autonomy and do not need intermediaries. Drawing up contracts and making transactions is automated and provided with a sufficiently high information security system. All actions are recorded and can always be checked if the parties wish.

There are several areas of blockchain applications in the energy sector. First, as already mentioned, it is organization of the energy market. At present, it is quite complex organizationally and chaotic. At the global level, it is highly influenced by political factors. Some suppliers can appear or disappear on the market, depending on the political situation in their countries (for example, Libya, Syria, Nigeria), sanctions regimes arise and end (against Iran, Venezuela, etc.), new norms of centralized regulation are introduced (like EU energy packages), etc. Of course, blockchain technology cannot change the general rules, but it can mitigate the consequences of sudden changes and allow the market to adapt to new conditions. Integration on a single technological decentralized platform of numerous market actors makes it easier for the buyer and seller to find each other, while avoiding many risks. By using blockchain currencies (such as USDT), automatic checking the participants of the transaction and its compliance with corresponding customs regulations, it is possible, according to experts' opinion, to reduce the duration of the transaction to less than 5 minutes.

The application of blockchain in the oil and gas industry is focused on replacing traditional "paper" trading in commodities with more transparent and cheaper "electronic" trading. VAKT, the world's first blockchain platform for oil trading, was created in 2018 and is a good example to follow. At the end of 2017, BP and Shell proposed "to build a digital blockchain platform based on commodity trading." The following year, a blockchain platform called VAKT was successfully developed and put into production, and the founding companies immediately used it to trade North Sea oil.

The introduction of blockchain technology facilitates the recording of reliable data on carbon emissions, which is now a matter of great importance. There is currently limited transparency in the global market regarding the methods, used to measure and predict emissions, and there is a problem of trust in available information. Blockchain can provide greater confidence in data from global carbon inventories and registries.

Another area, promising for the use of blockchain, is the exploration and organization of oil and gas production. It is known that the corresponding business processes are multilevel and involve a wide variety of actors. Exploration is not limited to just searching for a deposit; in parallel, the cost of launching operation and the further profitability of production should be assessed. During the whole process, it is necessary to take into account numerous geological, geographical, physical, chemical, demographic, economic, technological and financial factors (starting from the depth and thickness of the field and finishing with the cost of credit funds). Data is collected by all participants of the process, (starting from geologists and finishing by financiers), and must reach the stakeholders in an adapted form. The blockchain system can provide significant assistance in this.

A well-organized distributed database facilitates the process and reduces costs. Already at the exploration stage, geologists receive from the blockchain the meteorological and seismic information, and intelligent avatars are able to suggest (basing on available, previously collected data) where, when and how to start exploration.

### *Perspective Chapter: Blockchain Technology in the Field of Energetics – Organization of Effective... DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.111445*

Thanks to the constant real-time putting new data into the blockchain, recommendations are constantly refined, which reduces the likelihood of errors in oil drilling modes and accelerates the progress of the project. Already in the course of oil and gas production, monitoring of critical parameters allows you to quickly conduct an economic analysis and calculate such parameters as the cost of energy resources, the life of the well, etc. Blockchain technology makes it possible to ensure targeted access to information, its use for various, in particular, scientific purposes, without the risk of leakage of its confidential part.
