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He helped Microsoft build AI to help the climate. Then Microsoft sold it to Big Oil.
A former Microsoft project manager reveals how the tech giant is using AI to help Big Oil drill—and how he and his partner are now pushing for change.
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Will Alpine had every reason to believe he was about to help save the planet.
The software engineer had just landed a job at Microsoft, the climate darling of the technology world. It was 2020, and months earlier, Microsoft made global headlines for its groundbreaking new commitment to not only become carbon negative by 2030, but to remove from the atmosphere all the climate pollution the company had ever emitted since its 1975 inception by the year 2050.
Will saw his new role at Microsoft as a way to help fulfill that pledge, and create a climate-friendly model for the rest of Big Tech. As a project manager working on the company’s artificial intelligence platform, he was tasked with developing tools to make it easier for customers to use Microsoft’s AI in an ethical and environmentally sustainable way.
“I thought it was just the most exciting thing in the world, building the cutting-edge tools and technology that could really help fight climate change,” he recalled. Both Will and Microsoft were adamant that this was the future of AI: to help society transition toward a cleaner, greener economy.
Will poured himself into the job. He created a group called Green AI, dedicated to reducing the carbon footprint of Microsoft’s AI development and operation. He helped build the CarbonAware SDK, a tool that enables software programs to perform larger processing tasks when electricity is coming from low-carbon sources, and smaller tasks when electricity is coming from fossil fuels. He met his now-wife, Holly Alpine, who was organizing nearly 10,000 Microsoft employees into a community to incorporate sustainability into their jobs.
“I'd say for about a year, year and a half, we were heads down doing good sustainability work,” he said. “Only then did I start to realize who was really using the AI that I was helping build.”
“Our paychecks were dripping in oil”
Holly, then a senior manager at Microsoft, first learned her employer was selling AI to Big Oil about a year before Will arrived. “It was this really secretive thing,” she recalls.
In 2019, a high-level employee who worked on climate told Holly about several contracts Microsoft had to help fossil fuel companies increase their production. These companies, she learned, were using Microsoft cloud computing to process seismic data, and then using Microsoft machine learning algorithms and AI to analyze that data, telling them where to drill.
One contract with ExxonMobil was going to help boost production in Texas and New Mexico by up to 50,000 barrels per day. Another deal with Chevron would use Microsoft AI to “dramatically accelerate the speed with which we can analyze data to generate new exploration opportunities.”
Word spread, and employees grew concerned that Microsoft was massively undermining its own climate efforts. After all, enabling Exxon to produce 50,000 more barrels of oil per day meant Exxon would produce 18.25 million more barrels of oil per year. That meant Exxon would release 6.4 million metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere per year—all because of Microsoft’s technology. (Microsoft had pledged to remove 1 million metric tons of carbon per year).
So in September 2019, employees confronted leadership in a company town hall meeting. In a transcript manually recorded by employees present at the time, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella defended the deals, saying he believed that working with oil companies would ultimately help them transition to clean energy. “Give them that productivity boost so they can help themselves and help the world,” Nadella said. (HEATED did not obtain the transcripts from any named source in this story).
At another town hall in October, Nadella was pressed on the oil partnerships again. He was again adamant that Microsoft’s partnerships would help oil companies eventually transition away from fossil fuels.
“If we stop engagement, what’s the benefit? Who benefits? Nobody benefits,” Nadella said. “It’s not as if you can stop producing oil tomorrow, because the world would stop. The question is, how can we contribute to an energy transition plan?”
A few months later, Microsoft announced its aggressive climate goals—and employees were hopeful that this would be the end of oil partnerships. After all, Microsoft’s biggest competitor, Google, had just announced it would stop making AI tools for the oil and gas industry. Perhaps with its new climate goals, Microsoft would follow suit.