A spectrum of activists hope the push for decarbonization and the advent of electrical technologies will spell the phasing out, or outright end of oil and gas production. The Washington Post once described suddenly ending fossil fuel production this way: “The world would quickly grind to a halt.”

Executives who oversee some of the world’s largest fossil fuel companies have a similar view. Oil and gas is likely to continue growing in importance. But those executives are also striving to innovate, producing the globe’s dominant fuels more efficiently and with increasingly lower emissions.   

“If you look at the opportunities—I will not call them challenges—that the industry faces today, there is a huge increase in the population,” Tayba Al Hashemi, CEO of ADNOC Offshore told the audience during the opening session of the 100th Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition (ATCE).

“The standard of their lives is really increasing and as we speak, [but] 750 million people don’t have access to the energy. All of this together means that we really need to continue to provide the energy to the world,” Al Hashemi said.

Jeff Miller, president and CEO of Halliburton, and Meg O’Neill, CEO of Woodside Energy agreed with fellow panelist Al Hashemi, emphasizing the importance of oil and LNG when it comes to meeting growing global energy demands.

Related: Woodside to Maintain at Least 50% Interest in Driftwood LNG

Increasingly, oil and gas have framed energy use in terms of disparities. The vast majority of the global population is, in fact, energy impoverished.  

“About 13 barrels of oil per person are consumed by about a billion people,” Miller said. “The remaining 6 billion people only consume 3 [barrels].”

For those billions of people, the path to a better life is through energy consumption, he said.

“In spite of the near term ups and downs, which there are always near term ups and downs, my view is that the trajectory this industry will continue to be more and more relevant over time,” Miller said.

O’Neill said she sees natural gas, delivered by LNG cargoes, playing a large part in the energy mix.

And, it’s cleaner than its chief competitor, coal.

Natural gas produces half the emissions lifecycle of coal. The total global LNG market produces a fraction — about 12% — of the emissions that the world’s coal consumption does, she said. One way to increase consumption of natural gas and other, cleaner energies, while raising the standard of living for all, is to innovate.

Innovation, at least in part, has oil and gas companies turning to artificial intelligence (AI).

Al Hashemi told the audience oil and gas employees may fear AI replacing or taking away their jobs. She said newer technologies are designed to augment the industry.

However, she added a caveat: “AI will not replace engineers, but it will replace engineers that don’t use AI.”

ADNOC has established an artificial intelligence company, AiQ, to help subsurface engineers unlock more value with the overwhelming amounts of data obtained from operations.

“We have a vision to implement AI from the control room where we can control, adjust, monitor our wells, facilities, equipments, utilities and others all the way to the boardroom where we take the decisions,” she said. “Especially investment decisions or the budget decisions.”

In collaboration with Halliburton, ADNOC has rolled out the RoboWell technology that enables people to monitor, operate and adjust wells from the control room, without humans having to physically travel to the wellsite.

Halliburton also has plenty of AI-based innovations, especially in their hydraulic fracking offerings, Miller said. The company’s Sensori monitoring service allows them, for the first time, to measure where and exactly how much sand enters a reservoir.

“I’m really excited about what’s happening with digital and AI and what we call ensemble modeling,” he said. Ensemble modeling “is like a whole space of streaming for AI and the ability to accelerate or improve the productivity of people searching for oil and gas in the sense that it creates opportunities—but in a 10th of the time that it used to take,” he said.

Even though AI is rapidly increasing efficiency within the oil and gas industry, O’Neill had a different take on the technology.

A data center is a huge energy consumer, she said, with half a gigawatt needed to power it.

When data centers were for being built, they were only focused on how they would secure the surplus power needed to power the centers. Now communities where these are being planned are beginning to push back as the centers are driving up power prices for households that are already struggling with making ends meet.

“I think it’s actually going to spark quite a bit of innovation in terms of how energy producers and the technology providers can work together to come up with solutions. I think we’re going to see some interesting trends in where data centers are established,” she said.

With AI vastly and rapidly increasing the demand for energy, operators and service companies alike have begun to ramp up their talks around decarbonization, with the need to lower emissions as more and more energy is consumed.

“We need also to think about a way to reduce the emissions because we cannot ignore the climate change that we are facing today as an industry and we really have to be responsible to take the right actions and the right investment decisions to reduce our emissions as we are growing and continuous supply,” Al Hashemi said.

Despite ambitious emissions reduction goals, such as net zero emissions by 2050, decarbonization efforts seem to be moving slower than desired.

However, panel executives for ADNOC, Halliburton, Woodside, as well as Helmerich & Payne, said they are continuing efforts to reduce emissions. That, after all, is what their customers are demanding.

Miller said he’s confident in Halliburton’s—and the rest of the industry’s—ability to make crack down on emissions.

“When this industry makes something important, we do get it done,” he said. “And I think decarbonization is going to happen at a similar type of pace.”

Comments