But today, the industry is operating in a unique environment of volatile market prices, risks, societal pressure, fluctuating demand, and the world’s growing impatience for a low-carbon future. All this makes oil and gas business scalability a bit more challenging than just buying more industrial equipment and rolling it out or replicating processes on drilling platforms.
To ensure profitable and sustainable business, it’s vital to understand how technology can unleash immense opportunities for growth and scale.
Creating value with digital technologies
Developments in technology have finally caught up with the industry’s needs, and leading oil and gas organizations have started to invest heavily in digital. However, the sector generally lags in leveraging technological advancements to their full extent. There are significant opportunities for creating value beyond quick wins associated with process optimization, cost savings, and incremental efficiency gains.
So, what potential do the technologies hold for the digital oil and gas field? How can they help drive value out of existing and new assets, products, and services? Let’s see.
Digital twin technology to validate new frameworks and approaches
The ability to monitor existing facility conditions and replicate operating parameters has fueled the adoption of digital twins in oil and gas recently. With this technology, companies can design and test a framework or product long before applying it in the real world. New projects can be up and running faster because you can trial different scenarios, examine their potential impact, and determine appropriate risk mitigation strategies with an analytical what-if model.
This game-changing capability helps boost oil and gas business development and improve risk assessment by turning data from multiple sources into a digital simulator that generates commercial value. By implementing this model-focused approach, owners can uncover hidden revenue opportunities and continuously improve business sustainability.
Advanced analytics for strategic planning
Since oil and gas companies depend on statistics to run their operations, robust data analytics are useful in all facets. Crude oil, production, and asset management numbers can be turned from raw facts into business insights, for example. This knowledge can provide key decision-makers with the ability to build new ways of generating value. Advanced data analytics and reporting help executives orchestrate production planning and execution. Finally, they can design future-proof strategies at a company and asset level to support oil and gas business scalability.
IoT devices to gain increased visibility into processes and assets
The industrial internet of things emerged as a crucial technological advancement in oil and gas that allows companies to benefit from remote monitoring and diagnostics. By connecting field assets to the IIoT monitoring platform with smart sensors, operators can track equipment performance and other factors affecting production for just a few dollars a day.
Daily monitoring and analytics help you notice the change of critical equipment metrics like temperature and tubing pressure immediately. So, service teams can be sent to the site for preventive maintenance before any variations result in an accident. By doing so, you can ensure workforce safety and avoid unplanned downtime and financial loss.
AI usage for new production and exploration ideas
The potential applications for artificial intelligence in the oil and gas sector are vast. They go far beyond mere “better-faster” processes and range from remote survey and predictive maintenance to planning and forecasting to improving workforce safety. The integration of AI helps eliminate inefficiencies across the entire organization.
For oil and gas business development, the actual value of this technology lies in its ability to enhance the decision-making process with actionable insights from predictive and cognitive analytics. AI has the potential to transform data into actionable insights and provide the leadership team with a complete picture. In this way, AI-based tools help companies discover new production opportunities and fuel resource exploration by mapping and identifying oil or gas deposits.
Cloud computing to ease digital transformation and scaling
Due to the large volumes of data that companies produce daily, more oil and gas companies now rely on cloud services to scale their data management and storage. In fact, they act as a backbone for the efficient processing of oilfield data and facilitate the adoption of modern solutions.
Cloud computing enables necessary flexibility to scale up or down and so meet your needs at any oil and gas business development stage. For instance, you can expand cloud storage to satisfy the requirements of a new exploration site and cut back when it stops. This agility of infrastructure costs allows you to adjust the system quickly, so you only pay for the resources you use. Additionally, it’s much easier to buy more cloud instances than purchase and install hardware on-premises to respond to the growing company’s needs.
Adoption of technologies is only halfway to oil and gas business scalability
Digital solutions for oil and gas are at the heart of successful transitions and profound changes. Industrial IoT, cloud services, data analytics, and AI are now helping companies to gain business sustainability and improve the safety of their oilfield workforce. But technology adoption is only a part of the equation to tapping bottom-line benefits from your innovations.
Oil and gas business scalability through digital technologies requires a fundamental rethink of your operating model, culture, and, most importantly, decision-making flow. All this is critical to adopting new strategies, driving enterprise-wide digital transformation, and ensuring everyone within the company understands the importance and purpose of these changes.
We have discovered that organizations follow some imperatives to produce a tangible impact on the scale. Below we share several essential steps to harnessing the potential of digital solutions and gaining a strong competitive edge.
1. Reimagine your strategy
It’s vital to outline a path to growth from the very start. This means that you need to understand where your company is now and where you want to see it in the future. Having a clear vision and direction will help you adjust business goals and scalability strategies without cutting into your bottom line. At this stage, it’s important to consider how digital solutions will enable your organization to meet its high-level objectives.
2. Adjust your internal processes and operating models
Digitalization delivers valuable insights to improve decision-making at all levels. So, business leaders need to rethink their core flows to take full advantage of those insights and gas business opportunities. Changes to the operating models and culture are the most challenging ones. However, it’s critical to throw light on how digital tools can enhance staff performance and deliver better outcomes with less effort. A proper operating model should demonstrate how technology solutions can support people and processes to propel growth.
3. Ensure organizational agility
This ability is crucial for companies to achieve operational excellence today. For industry players, their well-defined procedures to maintain safe operations and risk management will still be vital. But at the same time, they need to foster flexibility and a digital mindset to empower better collaboration, faster decision-making, and new working models. The introduction of agile methods means an organization can rapidly form autonomous cross-functional teams and reprioritize tasks to adapt to market fluctuations, changing company needs, and other external conditions.
4. Set priorities
To ensure innovative and data-driven oil and gas business development, organizations need to develop essential competencies and capabilities in artificial intelligence, data management, and reporting. Executives and leaders should make an important decision on what skills they will develop in-house and what operations they can outsource to authorized IT partners. To do it, you need to weigh the control and agility of in-house activities against the speed and scale benefits of external development.
Required business transformation for top-line gains
As you can see, the path to growing as a sustainable data-driven O&G business is not an easy one. Integration of tech solutions requires a strategic approach, massive business changes, and the development of new competencies and skills. Once you decide what operations should be managed internally and which ones can be outsourced, we recommend partnering with a reliable technology company to advance your business capacity and better position yourself for success.
