According to Ravi Srivastava, vice president of data and operations technology at CNX Resources, throughout the COVID- 19 pandemic and for the past several years, many oil and gas producers have been able to maintain operational efficiencies to reduce costs, in large part, due to the emergence of automation and digital technology.
"A lot of us feel that technology is going to be a differentiating factor in determining the longer-term competitive advantage over our competitors. So, there's a role for it to play," Srivastava said during a panel discussion at the virtual Automation in Oil and Gas Summit. "The pandemic has accelerated the adoption of technology."
"The magic happens in plant data." -Tim Westhoven, ExxonMobil
Joining Srivastava on the panel, Caryn Ogier, project manager of operations technology for Noble Energy, said she interprets the level of business opportunity for the industry as remaining stable, despite the pandemic.
"Maybe it's accelerated or we're looking for more value out of it, sooner rather than later," she said. "I think the big opportunity we were looking at prior to the pandemic was a better understanding of our runtime and downtime data as part of a management or 'operating by exception' model. And we're still very much focused on that -- the idea being we want to be more efficient, improve our performance and do more with less. A lot of that effort is focused on standardizing work processes and systems."
Ogier said she believes this focus on standardization set up industry for future or predictive enhanced analytics.
"It's more of a waypoint rather than an ultimate destination. In the meantime, there's definite value to the business about increasing access to and understanding the data, better reporting, and getting better information from that," she said.
Value and magic
Discussing lessons learned while adopting digitization, co-panelist Hahni Elshahawi, deepwater digitization lead and formation testing and sampling technical expert for Shell, noted that while oil is often expensive to produce, that's in relation to its scarcity.
"Data is cheap to use. It's limitless in volume and has no default value. Its inherent value is itself," Elshahawi observed. "So as long as we get stuck with the idea that data is expensive, I think we can kind of forget about digital transformation."
The value of digitization is increased when decision makers give the data a purpose, Elshahawi continued.
"Then, you have to turn to its insight and link it to decisions and action," he explained. "Only when we focus on the process, when we go from data to action, can we succeed in digital transformation and transforming our business, whether it's in automation, machine learning or anything else."
Co-panelist Tim Westhoven, technology scouting and ventures advisor for ExxonMobil, shared that he hasn't had successful engagements for digital transformation that start with a partner saying, "Show me all of your data -- I don't need to know anything about your processes -- and I can help you fix things."
"After one of those experiences, I quickly learned the magic happens in plant data," Westhoven said. "Maybe not necessarily in the back-office business systems; I'm talking about machine data and those sorts of things. The magic I've seen happens when you get a combination of deep data analytics understanding and subject-matter expertise."
Westhoven said it's "really fantastic" when that combination of talents can be found in the same person.
"That's very, very hard to find, but if you can find it in a very small team of two or maybe three people, that's where I've seen the magic happen," Westhoven said. "And then, the difficult piece of that is how you scale it, and how you move from application to application.
"Any time an engagement starts with 'Just show me your data' and 'I don't understand your processes,' don't do that," Westhoven concluded.
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