AWS for Energy Symposium 2023

AWS for Energy Symposium 2023

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of attending the AWS for Energy Symposium held at the Marriott Marquis in downtown Houston. The event was very well attended by operating companies, vendors, and partners. The Marriott as usual was a fine venue and provided excellent service. I thought that I would share a few of the highlights worth noting. I won’t cover every speaker and with 7 breakout sessions, I could only attend one in its entirety.

Howard Gefen, General Manager, Energy & Utilities, AWS opened the symposium. He was followed by Lorenzo Simonelli, Chairman and CEO, of Baker Hughes, who introduced a new forthcoming solution, Leucipa, for wellsite automation. He gave a high-level overview of its functionality and vision for its evolution – more on Baker Hughes later. Then came Jay Crotts, EVP and CIO, Shell who talked about what Shell is doing in their digital journey, emphasizing the importance of change management. The final opening speaker was Woodside Energy’s Daniel Kalms, EVP & CTO, who shared Woodside’s story and explained their “FUSE” digital transformation platform.

After the break, the AWS team presented the AWS technical direction for energy. This was followed by a very informative panel of leading women in energy: AnnMarie Augustus, COO and Co-founder, Urban Electric Power, Cornelia Pool, CIO, Bloom Energy, Kristen Sanderson, Chief Customer, and Diversity, and moderated by AWS’s Farnaz Amin, Head Business Development, Grid Modernization, Energy Americas. Wrapping it up before lunch was Sam Perkins, Unconventional Technology Portfolio Manager at ExxonMobil, and Philip Father, CEO, Scepter. Perkins explained ExxonMobil’s work with Scepter for atmospheric monitoring of GHGs in the Permian Basin. Scepter’s unique sensor technology enables the simultaneous measurement of both methane and CO2.

During the lunch break GE Digital’s Rachel T Farr, Senior Director of Product Management, presented Electrify while Decarbonizing through Software, highlighting GE’s forthcoming carbon management solution which should be launched later this year.

The vendor/partner display area featured at least 30 tabletop booths offering a range of solution providers from cybersecurity vendors like Rubrik, networks like Palo Alto, databases like MongoDB, analytics software like TrendMiner, major ISVs like AspenTech and AVEVA, IT services from Slalom and Cap Gemini, and of course Baker Hughes, who was also a presenter in the Powering Innovation in Digital Operations, part of Track 6 which I attended. Interestingly enough, Baker Hughes AI/ML partners C3.ai and Augury, were nowhere to be found and were not even mentioned by Baker Hughes. BKR’s strategy in AI/ML seems a bit confusing as C3 and Augury are competitors. Further, the word is that BKR has not done very well with its C3-based applications and has written off much of its investment in C3. Ouch! Time will tell.

As I mentioned, I attended Track 6. It started with a panel discussion called Major Challenges Facing Digital Operations Today and Tomorrow, moderated by AWS’s Laurie Fitzmaurice, and panelists Chris Robart, Chief Commercial Officer, Ambyint, Steve Deskevich, VP of Strategy and Product, GE Digital, and Carl Young, CIO, Avangrid. This really turned into a good discussion of listening to the voice of the customers in software development.

This was followed by Matt Hall, Sr. Manager – IT Solutions of Hilcorp, and Matt Oberdorfer, CEO of Embassy of Things (EOT). Hall explained Hilcorp’s lean approach to automating field operations using AWS IoT and other Cloud services incorporating components from EOT to manage data ingestion and contextualization a.k.a. EOT's Industrial Data Fabric. This is illustrative of customers' increasing use of not just the AWS platform but of infusing AWS components in their solution, be they directly or with AWS partners. In this case, EOT uses AWS Twinmaker’s graph functionality to contextualize all types of data from time series to unstructured maintenance data. I had not heard of EOT before, but after seeing what they can do, they are sure to attract much more attention. This continues to show that startups are solving the data fabric and data hub challenges while traditional automation vendors and ISVs have struggled to convert their historians into scalable data hubs, and hence are forced to acquire technology that they cannot innovate themselves.

After a break, we heard from Ben Rice, Director of Engineering at bp Wind, and Dave Roberts, Chief Business Development Officer of PowerFactors. It was interesting to learn of bp’s renewables footprint and strategy as well as the challenges of entering the power generation business. Finally, last but not least, we had another overview from Baker Hughes on its Leucipa well site automation solution. Leucita unifies all the wellsite functions in one single pane of glass, with the ambition to perform advanced analytics and eventually automate certain functions. It’s an ambitious goal but worth the effort and will be attractive to many operators, though I think the majors and large independents do much of what Leucipa promises now or will build out the solution themselves. BKH said they plan pilots to start this summer.

Let me wrap up by saying that AWS has done a lot to step up in the energy space. They have added industry veterans to their staff who speak the customer's language and understand their business, be it in field operations like replacing traditional SCADA or providing scalable high-performance computing (HPC) for geoscience applications running on OSDU. And this is also reflected in its product development path and plans. And customers appreciate this. In fact, in a conversation with a major independent oil company geoscientist, I asked him what the difference was between AWS and their main competitor. His response was ... and I paraphrase …” AWS is just so much easier to deal with …” Well, that speaks for itself.

Thanks again to AWS for the opportunity to join the symposium. I remain an AWS fan. They are doing a lot of things right. Keep on doing it.