-By Fred Ojiegbe
Operators in the global oil industry, who converged at the just concluded Offshore Technology Conference (OTC), in Houston, Texas were of the opinion that full digitalisation is key to transformation in the offshore sector.
Speaking at a panel session held on day two of the conference, the Head of Business Development for Amazon Web Services (AWS) Energy, Arno Van Den Haak, stated that the offshore industry needs to accelerate the pace of transformation to realise the full value of digitalisation.
The offshore oil and gas industry has begun to embrace digital technologies in recent years, but it needs to accelerate the pace of transformation to realise the full value of digitalisation. These were among the key findings offered by Haak.
AWS is a subsidiary of Amazon that provides on-demand cloud computing platforms and application programming interfaces to companies on a metered pay-as-you-go basis.
According to Haak, these cloud computing web services provide a variety of basic abstract technical infrastructure and distributed computing building blocks and tools, which can be used by the offshore oil and gas industry.
“We are optimistic about the future of the industry. It has a long history of innovating in order to address the ever-growing demand for energy in a responsible way. But it will require a change in leadership, behavior, and attitude to embrace digital transformation,” Haak sak said.
The companies that survive the energy transition, he said, “will be the ones that can quickly change existing paradigms and spur the acceleration that will propel the industry forward.”
Haak also explained what the digital technology is set to do.
“Leaders must recognise that digital technology will shape the form of the company’s future, at the same time, the company’s future will shape the form of the digital transformation,” he stated.
He noted that new technologies have redefined the energy ecosystem, “democratising access, and allowing participants to move away from costly and time-consuming procurement processes toward software-as-a-service offerings. Shifting operations to the cloud can cut costs and improve efficiency, data capture, decision-making, and modeling.”
He also provided examples of the ways in which analytics tools for production monitoring and well optimisation can be offered to energy companies instantaneously, offering immediate insight without compromising security.
He noted that energy companies can have instantaneous access to new micro services that allow them to compare and contrast their own proprietary models with state-of-the-art models.
“Full waveform inversion modeling in the upstream domain is a pointer click away on a pay-as-you-go model, without the need to exchange large volumes of data. The time is ripe for innovation and transformation, rather than a minor reset. We strongly believe that this transformation must be a digital one,” Haak added.
Also speaking, the Vice President of Yutime Petroleum, John Boot, stated that the technology upgrade should be integrated through all the phases of development of the project, and not just into individual phases.
“Digital technology needs to be fully integrated into a project from design building, operations and maintenance and so on. Through this, we create a virtuous cycle that delivers gains in all aspects of the asset,” Boot said.
Boot showcased some of the solutions that his company has developed, like a 4D simulation software that creates a digital twin of the asset, and enables predictions on all its aspects.
“About 20 per cent of all energy usage in the construction of a project can be saved from the start with these kinds of solutions. Also, robotics, artificial intelligence and other tech are also part of the big data package,” he stated.
The Chairman of Major Marketers Association of Nigeria (MOMAN), Mr. Adetunji Oyebanji, reiterated the need to begin these processes now.
“I think all this will still take some time. It is the future, no doubt but we will need some major technological breakthroughs to make it happen quickly. Yes, we have a long way (to go), and unless there is (a) major technology breakthrough. Allow electric cars to have batteries that have (the) same mileage as cars,” Oyebanji added.