HOUSTON—“Is data the new oil?”

In a room of roughly 150 attendees, half raised their hands in agreeance and the other half—including most of the panel—disagreed with the question posed.

Kentaro Kawamori, chief digital officer at Chesapeake Energy Corp., David Mabee, innovagtion manager at ConocoPhillips and Colette Cohen, CEO at The Oil and Gas Technology Centre (OGTC), represented the contrarians on the panel held at CERAweek by IHS Markit on March 12.

“Oil is a true commodity of a raw substance that can be sold on the market and is only sold in a handful of varieties, if you draw that parallel, data certainly is not likable to oil,” Kawamori said.

Because data comes in trillions of variations and complexities, he said it is hard to imagine taking data from other oil companies like ConocoPhillips and running operations at Chesapeake with it.

But Kawamori didn’t keep a hard opposing stance, arguing that you can draw a parallel between the two.

“Where the comparison does make sense to me is when you look at the traditional lifecycle of oil, from extraction through transport then refinement and ultimately consumption, there’s absolutely a ton of parallels,” he said. “For us, that same lifecycle exists if I’m pulling data off of a well…I think there’s a case for both.”

In agreement was panelist Craig Hayman, AVEVA’s CEO, who said oil has a certain adherent energy value to it and data shares that characteristic but “it needs that flow through an organization to be valuable versus just sitting.”

“There’s an underlining foundation around oil and data if you think about what you’re wearing and the phones you’re looking at, all of those are enabled by hydrocarbons. I think we forget how pervasive the impact of hydrocarbons is and that’s a great parallel with data because data is incredibly pervasive,” Cohen said.

Considering data will continue to be the catalyst for many decisions in the oil and gas industry, panelists Colette Cohen and Microsoft Azure’s global principal program manager Hussein Shel argued how beneficial creating a data ecosystem is among all industries.

“One of the joys of data is that it’s reusable,” Cohen said. “Oil doesn’t get to be reusable in the same way and it doesn’t get to be passed.”

Cohen was particularly adamant on the idea of a global data pool considering her organization, she said, works as a matchmaker for startups and tech companies. From her experience with OGTC, she said she has seen the power of data sharing. But she strongly argued against commercializing it like oil because it would kill innovation like with procurement.

“What we have to be really careful about is that oil is quite elitist in the way that we trade it, the costs and what it enables. We have to ensure that data doesn’t become that. As a matter of fact, data is very open and that’s when it is the best,” she said.

Making a data pool open to everyone so somebody else can use it, she said, creates a win-win situation for everyone on a digital path. Also, smaller companies and startups have a greater chance at success according to Cohen.

Of course on the topic of data replacing oil, David Mabee said he can’t agree on behalf of oil-producing ConocoPhillips.

“I think that the danger of thinking of it within an oil company as the next oil is that you lose what your mission is and you’ll start doing stuff for the sake of doing them rather than focusing on what’s creating value.

“Tying it back to which is the tail and which is the dog, for us, the dog is making value through our assets. For us data, data analytics and all the power of what you do with that data is in service of creating value and assets, lowering the cost of supply, producing more efficiently, and drilling and exploring more efficiently,” he continued.

But like Kawamori, Mabee said he also sees a case for both sides.

He said in Canada they share data completely across all industries that are developing or producing and found “it was amazing to see the power of that data all in one place absolutely cleaned up and available. It was really powerful.”

Data is also shared in Norway, Cohen added.

“The ideas and opportunities that you could bring would be phenomenal. We shouldn’t talk about data as oil because we think of it then as a commodity rather than a tool and enabler—something that makes everything better,” she added.

Still, there is a cultural barrier to sharing the data in the this industry considering tradition and mindsets but Kawamori said data sharing—especially of subsurface—can lead to regulatory, environmental and operational wins.

“The companies that figure this out first, much like the companies that adopted previous ways of technology, will come out much differently,” he said.

“It’s not a zero-sum game in every single equation. Figuring out where it is a zero-sum game and where it isn’t, I think that’s what we still have to figure out.”

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