The 1980s witnessed a major downturn in oil prices followed by the ’90s with sustained rock bottom prices. As a result new investments in exploration & production were curtailed across the industry. Also, the industry went through a rampage of mergers and acquisition in the same time period. A combination of these two factors resulted into significant reduction in manpower. Even in schools, enrollment was down all through the ’90s thus producing fewer graduated in related disciplines. For example, in excess of 12,000 students enrolled in petroleum engineering across United States in 1984 whereas the number was below 2000 in 1997.

Now the entire industry is faced with a gargantuan manpower challenge to cope with the recent growth fueled by global energy demand. The several growth aspects include new drilling projects, construction of platforms, expansion of existing oil fields, restarting abandoned oil wells, oil sands and liquefied natural gas among many others. Human resource people across the industry are faced with tremendous pressure to recruit and retain talented individuals in mass numbers.

Part of the need can be catered by sheer numbers (upon availability) at an acceptable quality of expertise. For other aspects, new graduates can be recruited and trained for appropriate skill sets. However, innovation via technology development to meet the existing and future challenges in oil and gas is a field where quality of expertise is as important, if not more, as numbers. Technological innovations are not only required but should be integrated into the business in a nimble fashion. So the real question is; how can you find highly talented individuals in numbers who have capability to provide fast technology solutions? Conventional ways, such as hiring experienced oil and gas experts or new graduates in a related discipline, have very limited potential as discussed above. However, there is a different way of looking at the same problem and arriving at a progressive solution.

Unconventional thinking
Many technology development problems at hand can be deciphered in terms of physical, chemical, biological and mathematical sciences. Information, communication, materials and medical technologies have explored these sciences for past several years at a rapid pace and made several strides while the technology development in oil and gas was proceeding at snail’s pace. The cross-use of technologies among these industries is very common as well. For example, medical devices contain a computer chip or a radio frequency communication tag can be used for inventory management in material industry. Thus the real challenge for fastest possible technological innovation in oil and gas is to prompt these “other experts” to cross original disciplinary and work practice borders and apply their expertise to solving problems in oil and gas.

Additional benefits of such an approach are:

· Infusion of approaches, tools and techniques not familiar to the industry;

· Several innovation projects in oil and gas are going to be more and more complex needing expertise from several different disciplines simultaneously; and

· Multidisciplinary approach has the potential of arriving at unconventional results.

The approach
It should be a priority of industry to establish a bridge between innovation challenges at hand and possibly available but undiscovered solutions elsewhere. This effort can be envisioned as a different version of treasure-hunt game. The oil and gas industry would have to construct jargon-free clues (frame problems) that would make experts in other fields search for the treasure (answers). The combination of, an entity having the best ability to write the clue and a group of other experts having the ability to decipher the clues would win the game.

Industry experts can ruminate over addressing such an issue and may come up with varied approaches. Following are some of the ways to start bridging the disciplinary barrier.

  • Training classes can be offered at several group conventions explaining real problems and research needs. For example, arranging a class at the Material Research Society convention to explain the status of oil and gas technologies may trigger the thinking process of a material scientist towards his or her possible contribution;
  • Institutes such as API can disseminate a newsletter periodically explaining the challenges involved. Such a newsletter can be tagged along with periodicals of several other focus groups and societies;
  • On a more grass-root scale, one on one discussion between oil and gas professionals and professionals from other fields may be promoted; and
  • Advanced classes can be offered in schools as part of their continued education programs.

View from the top
Such a project is ‘platform type’ and an attempt to tag net-present-value or return-on-investment may not be appropriate. However, logical and prudent thinking shows significant promise in such an initiative.

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