IBM and Wood have formed a partnership that brings together Wood’s engineering innovation and IBM’s digital expertise in hopes of benefiting the oil and gas sector.

The news was announced in May during the Offshore Technology Conference in Houston.

Hart Energy caught up with John Sullivan, industrial sector lead and executive partner at IBM Global Business Services, to talk about how the sector is working with disruptive technology to improve operational efficiency.

Hart Energy: How important are digital technologies to the oil and gas sector?

Sullivan: Based on BMI’s recent research most oil and gas executives surveyed see new digital technologies such as AI [artificial intelligence], automation, Internet of Things [IoT]and blockchain significantly disrupting the industry over the next five years. The combination of harnessing data from operations through the capabilities of cloud, which allows you to break down organization barriers, with the Internet of Things that allows you to get more real-time data from operations plus the advent of AI, which deals with the interpretation at scale of both structured and unstructured data and the ability to form new trusted networks through the capabilities of Blockchain, will drive significant improvement in the efficiency of the end-to-end oil and gas and chemical value chain. This efficiency and transformation will further the goals of the sector to drive safe, reliable and cost-effective operations.

IBM, Wood, John Sullivan, oil and gas digital technology, blockchain, Internet of Things, artificial intelligence

Hart Energy: How important are partnerships to delivering this?

Sullivan: Successfully transforming operations through the adoption of new technologies requires a broad range of capabilities and expertise. Companies are therefore challenged to integrate across an increasingly fragmented set of services and technologies. Increasingly, the market demands collaboration between different providers with specialist areas of expertise to provide end-to-end solutions and common platforms across the ecosystem. We are the pioneer of many technology innovations and are delivering these safely and reliably to our customers. That said we recognize that other companies are experts in what they do, and we actively seek to partner with world leading firms to deliver for our clients. IBM has several partnerships/collaborations with software companies, service providers and EPCs [engineering, procurement and construction companies] that are rapidly developing and deploying digital and cloud-based solutions for their clients in the sector. Many of our relationships are long standing and have been driven by our desire, as well as the needs of the sector, to deliver what is required by clients to continually innovate.

Hart Energy: Can you tell me about any work you are doing in this sector?

Sullivan: With upstream we are currently working with companies such as Woodside to drive augmented intelligence at scale through the entirety of their operations to provide expert knowledge at the fingertips of onsite engineers. We have also dramatically reduced non-production time for drilling platforms by providing predictive analytics in real time to drilling engineers to be able to avoid outages. One of the more recent collaborations that we have entered into is with a highly important EPC player in the market where we have signed a multi-year agreement to collaborate on and develop digital, AI/machine learning and cloud-based solutions. This agreement will complement both company’s capabilities and client bases by offering end-to-end services from front line operations to back office. Within two weeks of publicly announcing the collaboration we have had an important client project awarded to us which will show the value of partnership in driving digital transformation to the market.

Hart Energy: Are there any other technologies that may be of use?

Sullivan: If AI is infused in every complex process, powered by IoT, and connected in real time to multiple blockchain networks, then the demand on computing power and the complexity of our underlying computing environments is going to explode. That’s why organizations around the world are developing next generations of high performance computing and making them available in the cloud. IBM is developing the next generation of quantum computing technology to address this challenge. Since 2016 we have already had more than 80,000 users who have run more than 3million remote executions on our 20-50 qubit quantum computer, which has been made available to the public in the cloud.

Hart Energy: How do you see the oil and gas sector developing over the short- and mid-term as far as digital technologies are concerned?

Sullivan: The sector and the leading companies within it are investing heavily in exploring and delivering digital technology projects. At every oil and gas client we are at, there are digital transformation programs underway, and they are investing in areas such as agile development to help them move at pace to deliver their programs. They are acutely aware of the challenge posed to them by disruptors in their space and are focused on developing solutions from HR to drilling to analytics and finally, machine learning. While their focus and investment are significant, we believe that they will need the support of their partner base—EPCs, IT solutions and service providers—in order to realize and deliver their ambitions.

In the short term we expect to see perhaps two things:

  • Firstly, investment in building upon their existing platforms such as SAP and Maximo to deliver integrated capability and moving to mobile platforms; and
  • Secondly, exploration of and investment in analytics, cloud and machine learning to help manage their assets and operations.

Over the coming years blockchain will make its presence felt more strongly in the sector in areas such as materials/spares management and in the trading of the commodity, and as AI/machine learning evolves and improves, this too will feature heavily in plans. The opportunities for the sector are significant, and the investment we are already seeing reflects that thinking.

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