Tackling challenges faced by oil and gas companies

Michael Zipf interviews James Woudhuysen after his Keynote address ‘Forecast of the Future: The Value of Ambitious Innovation in Energy’ at the International SAP conference for Oil and Gas, CityCube, Berlin April 2015

The International SAP conference for Oil and Gas is pitched to professionals in the oil and gas industries as a way of cultivating cross-industry thinking, in order to improve performance across the sector. There is a plenty of networking, sharing tips on best practise, and opportunities to discuss synergies. It’s the discussions on partner innovations and predictions of things to come, the chance to get a fresh perspective, that is probably of greatest benefit to the industry in the longer term though, and James delivered a speech at the conference to help with that. This video is of James being interviewed more informally by Michael Zipf, heading SAP’s internal media team about the future challenges we should be looking to overcome.

James flags up the need to deal with the way in which the oil and gas industries are now seen as problematic across society, which needs to be addressed rather than ignored. The focus on holding onto cash within the oil and gas sector rather than investing is innovation on the scale of previous decades represents a barrier to technological breakthroughs that are outwardly focussed. Rather than focus so much time on changing business models and financial engineering, the oil and gas industry would benefit from challenging the zero carbon mindset so prevalent today.

Ground breaking research requires us to take risks and occasionally fail in the laboratory, whilst the innovators in IT who talk about the ‘Internet of Things‘ need to be more knowledgeable about things, like carbon for example – so they can map it and track it. Software development offers a great deal of hope and practical solutions, but would benefit from being developed by people more schooled in geology, chemistry and physics. IT offers insights and solutions which would be enhanced by rubbing up against the physical challenges of mining and extraction in the oil and gas industry.

A silo mentality often exists in policy debates between competing sectors in the energy industry, which often misses the benefits of sharing technological development from developing a variety of solutions collaboratively. Looking at broader low-carbon solutions could mean drilling techniques developed for unfashionable hydraulic fracturing being utilised in lower carbon solutions such as geothermal energy sources.