2021 - Looking ahead

With the world ringing in the new year, we see the old year being remembered as something highly disrupting and challenging that probably most of us wants to leave behind, rather looking forward to making memorable moments in this new year.

At the same time the previous year has carried significance for our company – we have gained a tremendous amount of market recognition for our groundbreaking technology and solutions, visualizing and cognifying critical process streams. Practically speaking, this shows in our double-digit growth last year as a record year in revenue and bookings – and we are having big ambitions in 2021.

 From my perspective I will try to highlight some of the reasons for this on a grander scale and why I am also convinced of our continued successful growth and scaling up.

 Ways of working, interacting and enabling better operational performance has changed dramatically and it will not go back to what it was either. Remote support, startup and connectivity needs to be part of the solution. Also it can be noted that energy companies are growing closer to the tech environment and related companies. Look at the various alliances and partnerships announced over the past few months. And in the US, the exodus of tech companies from California relocating in Texas (out of various reasons!) I believe will nourish closer alliances further. 

My prediction is that we will see more of impactful cooperation between oil/energy companies and tech companies.

Digitalization is a must. Also digitalization and innovation go hand in hand. More of operational processes that have had limited data or a high degree of manual work-overs based on experience and best practices (“offline”) will transition to digital, real-time capabilities. This will need to be powered by hardware and reliable sensors (operational technology) from which data is accessed to support not only the operational aspects with improved monitoring and control to reduce operational costs and improve overall uptime; but also to support the enterprise level of the business with transparency and overview for energy efficient operations, GHG emissions impact (read: reduction) and other pollution control. But this should also be able to give a higher predictability and understanding for plant and operations risk elements and mitigation, impacting risk premiums and insurance aspects.

As such I believe we have only seen the beginning of the digitalization and related innovation taking place. This I am sure will further accelerate in the coming years. 

Like we have “mindfulness” aspects about our own awareness and being, we need “resourcefulness” for industrial processes. Not everything is easy, oilfields have a sea of data and large efforts are put in place to utilize this. But I want to emphasize an essential part which is the process stream at facilities (talking about oil & gas upstream production) – from my many years in this environment I have observed the set attitude and habits based on that it is seen as very challenging and costly to be able to get any sensible data. The flow of gas/oil/water/sand, where the oil and water to large extent comes as an emulsified liquid, complicating the online measurements as well as the separability and thus affecting the product quality. This leads to a variety of “cover-up actions” and out of a lean perspective this can be seen as waste.

What we need is to improve the acquisition of real-time data independent of process conditions (the more challenging operations, the more there is need for the data) and that should be from active sensors – compare it with taking blood samples from your body – it carries a lot of valuable and critical information. The same goes for the production stream. We need to make this an intelligent part of the process for pipelines, tanks and separators.

This is where we at ROCSOLE come into play. In order for operators to reach for high energy efficiency, large gains in production revenues and lower operational costs, our unique solutions with sensors (OT) and software (IT) utilizing high-resolution industrial scale tomography for detection of deposits, scale and detailed mapping of emulsified liquid layers are used. The broad user basis we have gained in short time confirms the need and unique features we can provide.

What we find exciting is that the very similar type of issues is found in so many varying industry sectors – whether it is for debottlenecking and pollution control for high yield semiconductor production, reducing biorefinery operational costs with real-time deposit control or process monitoring for detergent production as a few examples. The impact of our data is huge. 

We at ROCSOLE have a mission to make industry in general a better and safer place to be, and with the scale-up and impact we can bring with our unique solutions we are contributing to energy efficient operations that also results in cleaner and more affordable energy.

This year will be another highly exciting one for us and we will continue cognifying critical processes setting our course on reaching new land at the horizon.