How is Digital Transformation Supporting Operational Excellence in Oil & Gas?

The oil and gas industry faces a number of key challenges in the year ahead: the energy transition, changing regulatory requirements on emissions, oil price volatility, and a critical shortage of talent as younger generations turn their backs on a career in the industry. 

What will it take to succeed in the face of these challenges and how are companies using digital transformation to help? 

We asked some of the speakers at our upcoming Operational Excellence in Oil and Gas Conference how digital transformation was affecting their businesses.

Here’s what they had to say:

“Digital transformation has been a huge focus for QuarterNorth Energy. We've rolled out numerous programs, but one that I’m particularly excited about is the work we’ve done on automating our compliance systems.

In the offshore sector, you have some very technical requirements with production safety and we built a system that is intuitive, efficient, and drives compliance through multiple digitalized tools. 

Automated communication through these tools provides leadership and front-line users with real time data, event warnings and overall status concerning potential non-compliance issues. Awareness is key to the team so stakeholders can make sound decisions to manage operations, maintain compliance, and prevent the potential of undesirable events. 

We also introduced a QHSE pulse dashboard, which tracks all our health and safety key performance indicators in real time. We have recordable injuries, work hours, total recordable incident rates, status of platforms, wells, & pipelines and much more. 

We have truly transformed the digital footprint in managing our business and have seen significant results in our performance.”  

“One of the things that we're really working on is our onboarding processes. How do we get that employee who is new to Dow into our company culture and into our way of operating?

One of my favorite tools that we're using right now is microlearning. It means getting people information in small pieces. We're redoing a number of our training programs where we’re replacing two-day long workshops with a series of micro-learnings and hands-on skill check activities.

It’s so easy now to make simple videos and get the material in front of the learners as fast as possible. The people who have been through the first pilot said they appreciated that in 5 minutes or less they could learn a topic and then go back to doing something they needed to do for their job.” 

“No matter how many new sources of energy we develop, when you look at the overall energy equation for a world with 8 billion people in it, we're still going to be heavily dependent on fossil fuels for the foreseeable future. However, many of the workers in oil and gas are close to retirement and the industry is not attracting enough new talent. Digital transformation can help us bridge that gap.   

For instance, a lot of oil and gas workers - in refineries, petrochemical facilities, or in offshore and hydrocarbon production facilities – spend a lot of their time conduct inspections such as visual checks. What if we can do that with a drone? Or with smart cameras? Then we can use our people for work that is more intellectually demanding than just reading a sensor measurement and writing it down.”   

“There's a big push on the environmental, social and governance piece to make sure that we are doing the right thing from an environmental perspective, making sure our operations run efficiently, all the while making a huge transition from traditional energy to transition energy and beyond.

That means it's more important than ever that digital transformation is nimble enough to maintain our existing business, but also support the new generation of energy consumption. As technology leaders, we need to look at how can we position ourselves to be market leaders that could drive innovation not just from a technology perspective but also on the governance side.”   
   
Interested in learning more about this topic?  

The Operational Excellence in Oil & Gas Summit is the most inspiring showcase of oil and gas industry innovation in North America. Now in its 14th year, the summit brings together over 400 senior level executives to share use cases and showcase trailblazing technologies that will transform your operations. It's the best place to discover powerful solutions to your most pressing business challenges. Join us 7-10 November 2023 in Houston. Download the agenda for more information.