Can Covid-19 turn into opportunity for Oil and Gas?

Albert Einstein once said: “In the midst of every crisis, lies great opportunity.” The pandemic has been qualified as one of the most existential crises to ever hit the Oil and Gas industry. The question remains - can Covid-19 turn into an opportunity for our sector?

How has the ongoing pandemic impacted the global petroleum industry?

It has created the perfect storm. Companies have been afflicted simultaneously by a collapse in oil prices and demand, an increased pressure to manage the environmental impact and carbon footprint, and finally the necessity of adapting operations during a global health crisis.?COVID-19 has underlined that survival in our sector requires getting to the next level on adaptability, cost management and... to abandon business as usual. Consequentially, the pandemic has radically lowered the barriers to change that typically slow adoption of new technologies.

How are Oil and Gas companies responding??

According to multiple studies, digital adoption has leapfrogged five years of progress over the past 12 months. One of the most direct consequences of the pandemic has been a radical acceleration of innovative technology adoption for corporations. This is specifically true for the Oil and Gas sector and is best illustrated by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML).

This technology, once reserved for specialized applications, is now actively contributing to the optimization of every day operations across the Oil and Gas sector. Led by early adopters, more companies are transforming technologically, using AI/ML to improve their operations, adapt to regulatory constraints and remain competitive. These companies are not perceiving AI as a way to simply modernize their IT infrastructure, but are positioning the technology at the crux of their transformation strategy.

What can our Industry learn from early adopters of AI?

Early adopters have often realized they don’t have the resources on their own to fully advance their digital capabilities and implement sophisticated AI programs.?Irrespective of size, budget, and in-house capabilities, early adopters have centered their transformation around the development of the right ecosystem of partnership with tech providers, advisors, integrators that can effectively and collectively support the deployment of AI application at pace, at scale and at cost, while maximizing the value release across the value chain.?They have demonstrated that active collaboration is essential to properly address the breadth and depth of the change ahead.

Building an open ecosystem to foster interoperability and scalability of AI in our industry.

A good example of the above mentioned active collaboration is the recent launch of the Open AI Energy Initiative (OAI) , in which Shell, Baker Hughes, Microsoft and C3.ai joined forces to create the first open ecosystem of AI-based solutions. The initiative tackles some of the challenges early adopters of AI in our industry have been confronted with, namely disparate data location across multiple legacy systems, limited scalability of solutions across processes, equipment types and operations requiring manual set-up and re-calibration, expensive integrations relying on multiple technologies and skillsets, limited access to codified SME knowledge, etc.

By codifying domain-specific expertise, unifying systems, facilitating scalability and enabling full interoperability, the initiative set the foundations required to further accelerate and democratize the adoption of AI across the Oil and Gas industry, and more importantly supports the addition of solutions from other potentially interested stakeholders such as:

• Independent Software Vendors (ISV) that can contribute to the open ecosystem by developing additional industry solutions leveraging OAI tools and standardized APIs
• Service Providers that can access the collective technology and domain expertise of the OAI ecosystem and offer codified domain expertise through standardized APIs
• Equipment Manufacturers that can augment physics-based models and specialized software with AI capabilities and improve service levels with AI-enabled solutions
• Oil and Gas Operators that can adapt and deploy a comprehensive ecosystem of scalable, interoperable, and extensible solutions that are powered by cutting edge AI & physics-based models

The genesis and adoptability of such open ecosystems can help turn the ongoing pandemic into an opportunity for Oil and Gas.