According to Dr. Carole Nakhle, the COVID-19 virus and its accompanying variants have resulted in a "crisis like no other, and it is not over yet - it is actually far from it."
Nakhle, CEO of Crystol Energy, said she believes the oil, gas and petrochemical industries will look to the crisis as "a textbook example for many years to come on how to handle such an unforeseen development and what valuable lessons we can use to plan, not just in our industry, but across a wide range of industries."
Ensuring the safety of the workforce, Nakhle said, quickly emerged as the industry's No. 1 priority when the virus began spreading, but the stopgap solution extended beyond urging workers to work remotely.
"We needed to have people on-site to ensure that everything was running and reliable and provide critical services, too," she said.
Nakhle said dividing Crystol's essential workers into teams that rotated was a successful strategy that prioritized safety.
One overreaching pattern Nakhle saw emerge throughout the industry was the impact of digitization.
"[Organizations] that responded efficiently were, interestingly, those that were more advanced in the adoption of digitization and automation," she said. "Those companies and businesses were able to react more efficiently and more productively to the crisis than those who were late adopters of these technologies."
Biju Misra, director of Enbridge's operations, corporate business services and automation center of excellence, agreed that the pandemic has accelerated the adoption of technology.
Misra said placing IoT sensors in areas "where people don't have to go" has become part of Enbridge's safety culture.
Misra also noted that incidents have "naturally declined" throughout the pandemic.
"I think that suggests that credit belongs to those people doing the work and responding to emergencies in the field, who have been able to do 'a re-route' for the past 18 months," he said.
Lessons learned
Misra explained that his teams are currently focusing on analytics as they relate to predictive modeling.
"We need to know what is going to happen," he said. "There are regulations that actually dictate that. If this pandemic has shown us anything, it's that a lot of people [need to be on-site] just to get things done - things that are manual, potentially complicated and repetitive."
Resiliency built into the system, he said, is key "so that when the next wave comes, or the next event happens," the industry is better prepared to respond.
"We've found that, when people were working remotely, there were some processes that, now that we're miles apart, we're not able to run like we used to," he said.
Ultimately, Misra takes comfort in the lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic.
"I think what the industry can take away from this is that we can do in five days what we used to do in five years," he said. "It tells us that it's not that we didn't have the resources or know how to do these things. It's really that we didn't have the will to do it. If the pandemic has shown us anything, it's that technology has been driven by cost. But now, it's also survival."
