Spotlight on INNOVATION FACTORI Houston
Speaking to Per Irgens, INNOVATION FACTORI Houston manager, we explored the unique challenges faced in the US energy industry, the importance of supporting educational initiatives, and his ideas on future trends for digital.
Could you tell us a bit about your center?
We’re in Midtown Houston at the Ion Center, which is a vibrant innovation hub and hosts a diverse ecosystem of startups and established companies. Our location gives us a unique opportunity to meet and collaborate with many of our customers and partners, on cutting-edge solutions.
Being based in the US also means that not only are we where the unconventional revolution started, we are also in the most active area for carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) in the world. Both domains allow us to draw on our extensive experience in the subsurface domain to develop bespoke solutions to our customers’ challenges.
What are some challenges the local energy industry faces, and have you had any notable success in combatting them recently?
The energy industry here is a mixture of larger and smaller operators, who often have opposing challenges and requirements. Some smaller scale operators have a limited scope to explore and pilot completely new solutions. In those cases, we have our suite of tailored solutions, which are proven, reusable, and repeatable digital solutions that we can rapidly customize to meet unique customer needs and deliver accelerated value realization.
A particular challenge we’ve had success with recently is gas lift, a prevalent artificial lift method for local operators, which now demands dynamic injection setpoint updates to maximize a well’s potential, this challenge is intensified by high well counts. We’ve developed and implemented a well-centric gas lift optimization workflow for one customer to tackle this. It eradicates repetitive manual tasks and enhances efficiency and confidence through insights from multiphase flow. This workflow can now also be expanded to benefit both SLB and other operators in future deployments.
How does your center collaborate with the local energy community and educational institutions?
We’re passionate about supporting education both in SLB and in the local community, with initiatives like the Domain Data Scientist Program, where we are transforming domain experts into data scientists. We’re also very proud to support and elevate the diversity inside and outside of SLB, through our SPARK internship program. Created in partnership with our thisAbility network, SPARK works with local high schools, to promote and facilitate the development of the skills the local energy industry needs, in the next generation.
What trends do you see being significant in the next few years and how do you think we can best leverage them for success?
Knowing where to apply Generative AI is going to be key in future. But it’s essential to put it to use in a meaningful way in our solutions and workflows. This is where I see many struggling, defining what its real, tangible value is, and not an overly idealized version/vision. AI has already transformed our applications, and generative AI is showing great promise across multiple domain challenges and can unlock new frontiers of productivity across the energy sector, with applications from daily drilling reports to comprehensive geological surveys. This is paving the way for a new era of decision-making and operational excellence.
