Who Are the Innovators in the Upstream Oil and Gas Industry? Highlights from the Second SPE Global Innovation Survey
Authors: Perrons Robert K. 
Published: March 2023

Oil and gas have been mainstays of the world’s energy supply for much of the past century and will quite likely continue to play an important role in the global energy mix for many years to come. Despite the steady demand for its products and services, however, the industry that finds and brings these energy resources to market is undergoing significant changes on several fronts.

First, it is widely understood that the sector materially contributes to the planet’s overall greenhouse gas emissions, but it is working diligently to reduce its carbon footprint. Second, with much of the world’s “easy oil” already consumed, upstream oil and gas companies will have to use increasingly sophisticated technologies to find and produce tomorrow’s hydrocarbons.

Future oil and gas resources—especially in non-OPEC countries—will tend to be deeper, harder to find, and in environments that are significantly more difficult to access than they used to be. Third, policymakers and the public have steadily increased expectations for oil and gas companies with regards to environmental stewardship, safety, and human welfare. In the face of these kinds of challenges, technology will clearly play a pivotal role in the success or failure of oil and gas firms in the future.

As a step toward improving how the upstream oil and gas sector develops and deploys new technologies, the first SPE Global Innovation Survey (SPE 166084, SPE-1212-0062-JPT) was put together in 2012 to shed light on several different aspects of how the industry conducts research and development (R&D) and innovation-related activities. The unit of analysis for the first survey was the business unit, and managers from 199 business units around the world responded with data about many aspects of innovation-related activities within and outputs from their respective organizations.

While organizations clearly play an important role in the innovation process, these activities are invariably underpinned by the creativity, know-how, and imagination of individual people. Therein lies the motivation for the second SPE Global Innovation Survey, which was conducted in 2017. It dove deeper into the industry than the previous survey, this time asking individuals from a broad range of roles, levels of responsibility, cultures, and geographical locations about the innovation-related dimensions of their jobs within the upstream oil and gas industry. A deeper understanding of the roles of individuals in the innovation process is more important than ever as the organizations that make up the industry are being fundamentally transformed. Some of the largest oil and gas companies are reinventing themselves as “energy companies” rather than continuing to focus on their oil and gas legacies and are significantly overhauling major aspects of their businesses. How organizations configure their human resources has also changed considerably since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Individual-level innovative behaviors are therefore more important to understand than ever as the oil and gas sector’s institutions are changing and adapting in the face of these tectonic changes—and the people in the industry are the building blocks that will be reorganized as these changes occur.