SPE Offshore Europe Industry Emerges as Revitalized, Digitally Motivated
Authors: Whitfield Stephen , Zborowski Matt 
Published: November 2019

SPE Offshore Europe 2019 brought together a noticeably upbeat set of 38,000 industry participants from all over the world during the first week of September. Held in Aberdeen, Scotland, attendance at the conference and exhibition was markedly higher than the 2017 event, which came on the heels of an industry downturn.

Sustainability and the industry’s license to operate were primary themes during the conference, reflecting Europe’s aggressive commitment to the energy transition. But offshore technologies—especially those digital in nature—continued to carry the conversation among participants, who remain determined to make upstream work in the North Sea and elsewhere safer, more reliable, and more economical.

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Hurdles to AI Adoption Transcend the Technical

Stephen Whitfield, Associate Editor

The concept of artificial intelligence (AI) has been around for several decades, but it’s only recently that discussion of its capabilities have escaped the realm of science fiction, as platforms have begun to permeate nearly every level of our day-to-day lives.

Speaking at a panel discussion, Oil & Gas Technology Centre CEO Collette Cohen said AI tools could lead to big improvements in operational•efficiency.

“If we got it right, and we really got involved, we could have safe operations, cheaper operations, and have huge cost savings,” she said. “With all of the bounty of data that we have, this would seem like the perfect opportunity to apply AI.”

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As Oil and Gas Data Multiply, So Do the Cybersecurity Threats

Matt Zborowski, Technology Editor

The downside of the proliferation of data-fueled digital technologies in the oil and gas industry is the accompanying deluge of new cybersecurity threats.

Internet of Things (IoT) devices are becoming commonplace as sensors and edge processing pervade the oil field. Data lakes now hold petabytes upon petabytes of reservoir and operational data in the cloud. Digital systems are being integrated across different wellsites, different business units, and different companies, including legacy systems that were not designed with security in mind. And with these changes come more opportunities for threat actors to gain access to critical information and equipment.

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For Subsea Technology, “Necessity is the Mother of Invention”

Matt Zborowski, Technology Editor

The UK and Norwegian sectors of the North Sea have served as proving grounds for subsea technology. There, operators and service companies have spent decades overcoming a complicated mix of technical hurdles related to depth, pressure, temperature, and lithology to expand the region’s oil and gas bounty.

As with other upstream segments, the financial crunch felt offshore in the region during the oil-price downturn only served to accelerate innovation, but many challenges remain. Offshore exploration activity is lower, field sizes are smaller, the “easy” oil and gas has already been extracted, and oil markets are still in flux.

Natural Language Processing Improves Operational Risk Management

Stephen Whitfield, Associate Editor

Safe and efficient operations on an offshore facility require careful planning, often taking into account current conditions and the risk potential of any particular job.

In the past, Equinor manually consulted multiple data systems with separate user interfaces to get a view of a facility’s technical status and previous incidents. On top of the time-consuming nature of such work, planners still could not get a complete overview of the full asset status, leading planners to focus individually on the tasks within their disciplines.