By Using Urban Digital Twins: Net Zero’s 2050 Deadline Can Be Slashed By 15 Years, Says Cityzenith CEO

If The World’s 100 Biggest Cities use digital twins to de-carbonize, “we can achieve Net Zero in 2035”, says Cityzenith CEO Michael Jansen.

World leaders have been offered the tantalising prospect of victory 15 years early in the battle for Net Zero – the point when humanity’s excess global CO2 emissions are either eliminated or offset.

Global scientific consensus says Net Zero must be achieved by 2050 to avoid catastrophic climate change, triggering major loss of life and habitat, plus economic disaster, but Cityzenith CEO Michael Jansen told a key international conference:

“Digital Twins are the perfect tool for managing and accelerating the energy transition. If we did this in the top 100 cities in the world, we could get to Net Zero globally by 2035…(instead) we are talking about 2050 right now.”

Jansen was speaking at the two-day Future Digital Twin conference & expo attended by more than 700 oil, gas and energy professionals from around the globe. The Cityzenith CEO joined a panel of leading Digital Twin exponents, including Dr Michael Grieves, Executive Director and Chief Scientist of the Digital Twin Institute.

Dr Grieves – widely regarded as ‘the father of the Digital Twin’ – suggested that international deployment of Digital Twins within an over-arching and beneficial virtual ‘metaverse’ mirroring mankind’s physical presence on Earth was still a long way off, with too much ‘siloing’ within industries including oil and gas, and energy.

And while internationally agreed standards for Digital Twin deployment would help, he said this might take too long and be influenced by politics. He called instead for Digital Twins users to “play nicely” and work towards a common Digital Twin platform and, ultimately, an integrated system of systems.

This chimed with Cityzenith CEO Michael Jansen’s standpoint: his company already has that platform, SmartWorldOS, a software that can integrate and work with the myriad of building design and management software used across construction and other industries.
And Cityzenith has its sights on the biggest decarbonization target: the world’s cities, which UN statistics say consume 78% of global energy and produce 60+% of greenhouse gas emissions yet cover less than 2% of the Earth’s surface.

Furthermore, just 25 mega-cities produce 52% of the world’s urban greenhouse gas emissions.

Cityzenith has responded to these damning figures with its ‘Clean Cities – Clean Future’ (CCCF) initiative, deploying SmartWorldOS (SWOS) to reduce operating costs in urban buildings by 35%, and boost productivity by 20% and cut emissions by 50-100%.

High profile Cityzenith customers he named at the conference included New York City, Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Los Angeles, where SWOS is being deployed on significant projects that can be scaled elsewhere and ultimately across entire cities and infrastructures such as transportation, energy, and water and waste management – he was confident that Cityzenith would have 100 cities as customers within two years, with 300 the year after.

The Future Digital Twin conference & expo focus was driven by the oil and gas industry’s need to change at pace to maintain energy security – now exacerbated by the Ukrainian conflict – while also driving decarbonisation. The conference conclusion for hydrocarbon companies was clear: incorporate Digital Twins into your strategy or risk being left behind.
Major energy industry players who attended and sent speakers included BP, Chevron, Equinor, ExxonMobil, Petrobras, Shell, and TotalEnergies.

Adam Soroka, MD of conference organizer Cavendish Group International, said afterwards: “It’s clear from the open and constructive discussions over the two days that Digital Twins are gaining momentum, and shifting from a nice-to-have to a must-have technology.”