DSDE: Features

In recent times, we have been inundated with articles concerning the oil and gas industry’s race toward digitalization and automation. The pillars of such a transformation are the rapidly evolving industrial Internet of things, secure cloud computing, data analytics, AI, and machine learning.

Merging tried-and-true physics-based models with data science is bolstering the Houston independent’s reservoir-engineering work on its deepwater and shale assets.

Marathon Oil says its shale fields are producing more oil and gas with less hands-on work from company personnel thanks to a growing arsenal of digital technologies and workflows.

DSDE recently spoke with Bill Vass, vice president of engineering for Amazon Web Services, about his observations on the oil and gas industry’s digital efforts and Amazon’s aggressive growth in the business.

The criticality of above-water riser hull piping requires frequent inspections. Traditional manual inspection methods present safety and efficiency concerns, but work is being done to see if robotic technologies—such as drones and crawlers—can do the job as good as, or even better than, humans.

Malaysia’s Petronas, Shell Malaysia, and Thailand’s PTTEP are now in the midst of full-scale digital adoption. The companies are beginning to see results, but none is counting on a “big bang” in development of the technology soon.

Studies conducted through collaboration between an operator that knows the physical reality and a data-science company that knows the best machine-learning methods yield good practical results.

Digitalization and new technologies are disrupting old practices and shaping a new safety landscape for the oil and gas industry. At OTC, a panel sponsored by the Center for Offshore Safety looked at the effects of some of these new technology trends.

The technologies born out of innovative ideas have been critical for advancing deepwater assets in the past, and venture-capital investment helps incubate risk-taking companies developing those technologies. With digitization becoming a greater focus in industry, what role will venture capital play?

Robots may not be ready to take over the world just yet, but they are making great strides in the offshore industry. A technical session at this year’s Offshore Technology Conference presented some of the advances, including untethered ROVs and subsea broadband communications.