Take the subsea industry, for example. The average time taken from an initial idea—that “eureka” moment—to implementation in the field is 30 years.

That’s according to Pål Helsing, president and executive vice president of Kongsberg Oil and Gas Technologies, speaking at a recent industry conference.

Thirty years is a long time in anyone’s books. Understandably, the subsea industry is looking to speed things up a bit and, at the same time, cut costs in the low oil-price environment.

The way to achieve this is through innovation—not necessarily through technological advances but by thinking outside the box.

Helsing told the Underwater Technology Conference in Bergen, Norway, “Innovation is about creating something new that is valuable and can be implemented. Innovation can be many things. It can be technical, organizational, in how we write technical requirements, the whole process.”

And this brings us back to the old chestnut of standardization, which, let’s face it, has been around as a discussion topic for a
few years now. Per Sandberg, chief of innovation at Statoil, said, “I’m very happy that standardization is talked about as an innovation. The success of subsea has been driven by technological magic—one technological piece of magic after another. But innovation can be many things; it doesn’t have to be a technological solution.”

“We are addressing the fact that we have probably made things too complicated. We have tailor-made too much. The solution is simplification and standardization of the interfaces of the module types, etc. It is not about technology; it is about collaborating, cooperating and agreeing.”

Helsing highlighted BP’s Well Advisor digital solution, developed in collaboration with Kongsberg. The technology uses sensors on the drillstring to detect friction as the well is completed and alerts the drilling team before it becomes a problem.

According to Helsing, it is being used globally on 26 of the operator’s rigs and has been 100% successful in avoiding stuck pipe in hundreds of runs of well casing, saving an estimated $200 million in reduced nonproductive time.

Another speaker, Herve Valla, CTO at Aker Solutions, highlighted the fast-track development of the riserLOCK system,
which has been developed to enable the quicker connection of risers. “It makes the connection faster and avoids having people in the rig zone, which is a huge health and safety advantage for the operator,” he said.

Both of these examples were achieved with cross-industry collaboration, something OneSubsea’s CEO Mike Garding sees as going to the heart of the matter. “To achieve standardization, collaboration between operators and technology suppliers at the earliest stage of the cycle is essential,” he said.

“In addition, reusing field-proven designs is a standardization strategy that would reduce capex and shorten cycle times by eliminating reengineering, qualification and documentation.”

Looks like standardization is just innovation by another name.

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