Digtial tech investments to cut upstream production times

Faster and better decision-making and shorter time to first oil and gas top the list of expected benefits that digital technologies can drive for upstream oil and gas companies, according to a new digital trends survey from Accenture and Microsoft.* Respondents also estimated the monetary value of digital technologies and noted the next wave’s potential to further transform their business, despite ongoing low oil prices.

Asked to identify the top ways digital benefits their companies, faster and better decision-making (30%) remained foremost, as in the 2016 edition of the survey. Faster time to produce oil and gas, however, jumped to second place from fifth last year (19%). Reduced risk enabled by real-time decision support was the third most important (12%).

Now in its sixth edition, the global survey showed the upstream areas most expected to benefit today from digital are production (28%), geological and geophysical (27%), and drilling and completion (19%).

Almost two-thirds (62%) of the more than 300 professionals surveyed perceive business value from digital technologies, with 27% totalling it at $50mn to $100mn or more for their companies. However, 14% of upstream respondents don’t know how much monetary value digital is delivering, 20% don’t measure it, and 4% believe digital is adding no value to their businesses today.

Most of the respondents expect their companies to realise value from digital technologies and 73% said most of their oil and gas fields will become fully automated using these technologies in three to five years. On the other hand, 39% of respondents said the greatest risk from a lack of digital investment is becoming uncompetitive; more than double the next group at 19% who cited the inability to transition to a new energy landscape. Surprisingly, despite the rise of connected devices on oil fields further exposing upstream companies to cybersecurity risks, the fear of increased cyberattacks came in at a distant third (18%).

‘Upstream oil and gas companies are evolving from only using digital technologies in siloes to using these digital technologies and the related new ways of working to transform entire business areas,’ comments Rich Holsman, who leads Digital in Accenture’s Energy industry group. ‘Our survey respondents see big data and analytics, cloud, the Internet of Things (IoT), mobility, high-performance computing (HPC) and cybersecurity as having the greatest potential to transform their businesses. In the next three to five years, 70% plan to spend more or significantly more on digital technologies, and the next wave includes HPC, wearables, robotics, artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain.’

Digital technologies that upstream companies are investing in today include mobile devices (56%), cloud (45%), big data and analytics (43%) and IoT (42%). Priority investment areas for these technologies are asset management and maintenance, capital project management and production optimisation.

‘It’s not always about petabytes of data. It’s about a set of solutions and technologies that could not have been achieved even five years ago,’ notes Egbert Schroeer, Worldwide Managing Director, Process Manufacturing, Microsoft. ‘Digital is doing more than helping reduce operational costs through increased worker productivity with mobility. The cloud, better asset management and remote monitoring through analytics and AI are driving operational excellence and subsurface data management for the oil and gas industry. However, it will be essential for upstream companies to quickly develop in-house capabilities and add external talent for data analytics and other leading technologies, to stay ahead in the digital revolution.’

Upstream companies are also now adding digital workforce challenges to their ongoing talent concerns. Recruitment is their biggest challenge in this regard, especially skill-building for contingent labour, freelancers and onboarding new hires. Most said it will take three to five years to build the necessary digital skill base. For example, the great majority of respondents (85%) felt their companies lacked fully mature analytics capabilities. While they plan to develop that area, the expected three-to-five-year time frame in which they aim to do that might be too extended – competitively speaking – as technologies advance rapidly. This is especially relevant, as a recent Accenture Strategy study, The talent well has run dry, notes the oil and gas industry could experience a shortage of 10,000 to 40,000 petro-technical professionals by 2025.

The 2017 Upstream oil and gas digital trends survey can be found at www.accenture.com/us-en/insight-2017-upstream-oil-gas-digital-trends-survey

Petroleum Review will be taking a closer look at digital developments from BP’s point of view in its December 2017/January 2018 issue.