Reflections of ONS 2018 Innovate
This year’s ONS had a very positive flare, the 28 E&P companies have a clear intention to invest and several large new developments offshore Norway are already underway. This brings a strong lift in the spirit of the 1124 exhibitors and 68 174 visitors, which have been in a though squeeze over the last few years. The last years lift in oilprice has resulted in an increase in the eagerness to invest and this makes the backdrop of this conference.
This years theme of the ONS18 was innovation, and with this two trends were apparent. The ONS is no longer just a meeting ground for oil feild development, it is more and more about energy in general, and renewables in particular. It was windmills and solar power at quite a few stands and a strong will to talk about the commitments in the renewables sector at the conference.
Another main track within the innovation theme was digitalisation –this is something all actors in the industry are concerned about today. We can see a paradigm shift with the recent advances in IoT technology, cloud services becoming more accessible,readily available and accepted in the population. This is being further influenced by the increasing numbers of petabytes of data in storage and resilient data silos — the ever continuing issues that riddled the industry for years. Oil and gas has in many ways been in the frontiers for developing scalable solutions when it comes to IT. The times we live in now are no different, but now the momentum is on the Cloud services and -with increasing oil prices and the general push for investments in effective solutions — the money is back.
In particular, most speakers at the conference track ‘Innovate NCS’ (Norwegian Continental Shelf) addressed digitalization. However, one of the speakers, Lundin’s CEO Alex Schneiter also underlined the importance of people as the innovative force and a success factor in the company. Schneiter is leading the company that is known for exploring areas that would normally be classified to be outside the generally accepted exploration model in NCS. Innovation is all about doing what is outside the generally accepted opinion, and evolve new business opportunities, and Lundin has demonstrated this ability well in the exploration of Utsira High field.
At the same session, we saw an impressing story showcasing cooperation between AkerBP, Cognite and Google Cloud, well demonstrated by Karl Johnny Hersvik. It seems clear that innovation can happen not only internally in company, but also in an environment of cooperation between data owners, software and Cloud providers. The user interaction between process, operational management and staff in one platform was the key element in the solution shown to the audience. In addition, most of these things were controlled by speech and real-time interaction.
Computas has a similar story about collaboration and innovation currently evolving for engineering at Aker Solutions. Following this space , there is more to come.
Innovation is a grand topic we are passionate about. Feel free to contact us to do innovation together — starting small, growing big. Together.
