Guest Editorial

Digitalization and automation successes are here to stay. Instead of making small incremental steps in well construction operations, allowing disruptive shifts can lead to tangible performance gains in efficiency, safety, and well integrity.

In addition to the well-recognized elements of digital transformation such as real-time monitoring, remote intelligence, and extraction of insights from data, there is a need to evolve the industry hardware through application of enhanced edge computing.

Unlike shale, deepwater plays—which are highly front-loaded investments with long project cycles—will be least affected by the current round of severe investment reductions. Large offshore plays in safer regions have become essential elements of the core business of large oil and gas players.

In 2004, US oil production was in decline, Facebook did not exist, and attitudes toward climate change were in flux. In years since, what has happened—and what’s important for the oil and gas industry of tomorrow?

Despite the global downturn, the long-term transition to net zero presents a major opportunity to create new multibillion industries based around the North Sea. Cross-sector collaboration and major state/private sector intervention, together with strong leadership, will be key.

Now more than ever, safely managing the role of digitalization and the demand for decarbonization while efficiently balancing the books will be critical for companies to survive and thrive.

There are numerous views of what the future energy landscape will look like in the next decade and beyond. When thinking about sources of primary energy, it is not a question of either/or, it is a question of what can reach scale fast enough to meet continued demand growth.

If design A yields the same 90-day production at 10% lower cost in a series of wells than design B wells, is design A the better one? Using pressure-based fracture measurements, the separability of variables between two completion designs can be evaluated.

Drilling rig automation is increasing as the industry realizes its benefits. What about downhole automation of the drilling process, specifically directional drilling? What problems might it solve and what opportunities might it create? The opportunity is huge, if only we look in the right place.

Carbon storage is perhaps the only viable option for reducing carbon to the levels that many governments have agreed are important, and EOR is the only proven technology that can be made ready in the time and at the scale required to accomplish this reduction worldwide.