Reinventing our Technology Landscape
In his plenary address to the SIS Global Forum 2017 in September, executive vice president of Technology, Ashok Belani highlighted the importance of collaboration and embracing change to enable digital advances in oil and gas.
“The changes that are in store for the E&P industry … open up the possibility to reinvent the way we work. They will lead us to higher levels of efficiency, performance, and productivity.” That was Ashok Belani’s opening gambit at the Forum in Paris.
In the course of his speech, Belani put into context the launch of the DELFI cognitive E&P environment, showing its building blocks and making a powerful case for the industry to embrace new digital technologies.
He also highlighted the importance of collaboration to success, talking about the company’s work to foster an ecosystem of technology collaborators.
He said: “There is no way into the future without this type of ecosystem. Over the last three years, we have engaged with 400 software companies, have done proofs of concept with 50 of them, and made investments in more than 10 of them. We have learned a lot.”
Enabling technologies
Belani highlighted the opportunity for oil and gas businesses to use the enabling technologies offered by technology companies, for example cloud computing. This has allowed Schlumberger to run complex seismic processing jobs that would previously have taken eleven months, in only four.
He said: “There are many enabling technologies like this, that we work on with different companies, and we use our knowledge of the oil and gas business—the kind of data we have, the kind of algorithms we use—to see how we can enable the E&P industry to move forward. All of this is captured in DELFI.”
He unveiled the first proof point of the DELFI environment, the well construction solution DrillPlan, saying: “We believe it will reinvent the way the most important activity in the oil and gas industry is done. And that is drilling.”
Belani closed by acknowledging that change can be a challenge for organizations, but that embracing it is inevitable. “We believe that the propensity to reinvent can take an organization forward much faster, challenging—every day—the way things are done, to be able to reach the technical limits as fast as possible.”
