Shell Lubricants introduces immersion cooling fluids

Shell Lubricants has introduced a range of single-phase immersion cooling fluids to keep computer components cool in an efficient way while helping to cut energy consumption and lower carbon dioxide emissions especially in energy-intensive facilities such as data centres.

Monday, 16th October 2023 Posted 6 months ago in by Phil Alsop

“We believe Shell’s immersion cooling technology is an essential piece of the puzzle in tackling data centre energy use that will be key to helping customers deliver on their sustainability commitments,” said Mansi Tripathy, Vice President, Shell Lubricants for Asia Pacific.

“Made from natural gas using Shell’s gas-to-liquids (GTL) process, Shell Immersion Cooling Fluids are designed to maximise the energy efficiency and performance of data servers and information technology (IT) components.”

Shell’s GTL products made from natural gas are synthetic fluids. The colourless and odourless fluids are inherently biodegradable to different extents, stable and provide excellent performance and material compatibility.

Combined with other low carbon solutions offered by Shell such as renewable power, smart energy management services and certified carbon credits, the deployment of single-phase immersion cooling supports data centre operators’ goals of optimising performance sustainably.

With the growing use of data-intensive technologies, such as the Internet, cloud and edge computing, artificial intelligence (AI) and big data analytics, demand for server space is increasing rapidly, placing greater demand on global data centres. Data centres account for about 1% of global electricity consumption, with more than a third of this power used for cooling electrical components.

Shell is an early adopter of the immersion cooling technology and recently upgraded its high-performance computing (HPC) cluster at Skybox, a U.S.-based data centre, which already operates on 100% renewable power purchased from Shell Energy, to demonstrate a fully integrated, optimised, and scalable solution for its customers.

The immersion cooling solution, implemented in Shell’s HPC cluster in Amsterdam, is helping Shell deliver high-end processing power while reducing its energy consumption within a T-Systems managed data centre.

Shell Lubricants is also looking to work with key players in the data centre ecosystem in Asia – such as tank original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), system integrators, data centre owners and co-locators – for proof-of-concepts with its immersion cooling fluids to meet next generation computing requirements.