Elastic has signed up to an open data platform being laid out by a group of fossil fuel operators.

The search and more vendor is joining the The Open Group Open Subsurface Data Universe Forum. This is an effort to develop a “cloud-native subsurface and wells data platform for the oil and gas industry”, by oil and gas operators, technology providers, service companies, academia and standards groups, under the auspices of the Open Group.

According to the announcement, the common platform will “reduce silos and put data at the center of the subsurface community”.

“Initial implementations will be undertaken by Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and Amazon Web Services, with others expected,” it continued.

Elastic sees its technology as supporting “the analysis of a range of geospatial, full-text, and numeric data that is critical in this space”. Exploring for and extracting oil and gas relies on vast amounts of data.

Elastic said it was joining the group to ensure it is “aware of the full capabilities of our technology. If the Forum decides to use Elasticsearch, we, as its creators and maintainers, want to ensure that it is used following our best practices to provide maximum value.”

“Gathering and storing data is the first challenge; leveraging and searching data and gaining data-driven insights is the next. We believe the Elastic Stack provides a key component in that architecture.”

That Elastic sees the potential for its technology in particular, and cloud native in general, in the oil and gas industry makes perfect sense.

Tying itself quite so publicly might not be as sensible. 

Environmental campaigners are increasingly targeting companies involved in the fossil fuel industry. Meanwhile developers are increasingly flexing their muscles against suppliers, and their employers, doing business with entities they don’t agree with. In recent weeks, both Chef and GitHub have attracted the ire of both employees and the wider development community after it emerged both had contracts with the US’ Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.