Youthful digital aces will be oil’s next generation
More than a third of the workers in the U.S. oil industry will retire in the next five to 10 years, but as executives look to recruit the next generation, they are not seeking the skills of the past.
What the industry calls “The Great Crew Change” coincides with “The Digitalization of Everything,” changing the prerequisites for even the most basic jobs in the oil and gas industry. This new approach to work couldn’t come soon enough for an industry that struggles to attract and excite young people who have grown up in the digital world.
“The first tasks that are going to be automated offshore is essentially the heavyweight ones, the unsafe tasks,” Peter Moles, director of emerging technologies at Oceaneering, said during the Offshore Technology Conference. “When you look at automation, we’re trying to put the experts on the beach. We don’t want anyone offshore.”
The oil and gas industry, particularly the offshore sector, is focused on reducing accidents and lowering costs. In this case, the priorities are complementary, achieved by employing fewer people in dangerous places.
For years, drillers have slowly moved jobs off the rigs and into Houston offices, where workers cost less and can sleep in their own beds. With lessons from the Deepwater Horizon accident in mind, BP is using intellectual property from NASA’s Mars Rover mission to improve remote operations, said Tim Airey, an artificial intelligence and robotics technologist at BP.
“The confluence of robotics and sensor capabilities is expo-
“We’re trying to put the experts on the beach. We don’t want anyone offshore.” Peter Moles, director of emerging technologies at Oceaneering
nentially brewing,” he said. The company is studying how humans can operate machines from the other side of the planet.
Companies are also studying how computers with artificial intelligence can use the enormous amounts of data they collect to help engineers make better decisions. Energy companies are far behind other industries, said Rustom Mody, vice president for technical excellence and enterprise technology at oil field services company Baker Hughes.
Most companies only use their data to monitor and diagnose problems, but the next step is using the data to optimize operations and predict problems so that unplanned outages are a thing of the past, Mody explained. That means hiring more software engineers.
“Instead of our engineers leaving the industry and going to Apple and Google and Facebook, we have to start attracting them and pulling them back to us,” he said. “Without humans, well-trained employees, it’s very difficult to embark on this journey. Not only do we need to develop new talent, we have to be able to attract new talent.”
Industry veterans love to talk about the early years of their career, traveling the world to spend weeks at a time on offshore rigs with nothing but the ocean for as far as they could see. Many brag about their roles managing billion-dollar pieces of equipment, while others lament the time away from loved ones.
Yet in the internet age, when telecommunications have shrunk the world, companies find it difficult to persuade young engineers to isolate themselves to advance their careers. Instead of using the internet to connect with home, they ask, why not use it to connect to work? And why look at faux representations of oldschool gauges when computers can present data with complex visualizations that present the most urgent data first?
“In mixed reality or virtual reality, we don’t have to replace the control panels we see today. We could look at an engineer stepping into a virtual world and having data presented in a very different format,” Airey said.
Companies are trying to answer these questions. Some envision entirely robotic offshore rigs, served by unmanned vessels and operated by human beings immersed in a virtual world where artificial intelligence prompts them to make the best decisions.
“You want it to be completely autonomous, a lights-out, fully operational facility,” Mody explained.
Engineers, builders and operators will keep their jobs, but skilled onboard laborers will not.
“The majority of people who are offshore are operating machinery, which will probably, unfortunately, go away and be replaced with people who analyze the data,” Moles said. “It’s going to be people who are more theory-orientated, who understand the operations, rather than folks actually doing the tasks.”
Every expert agreed that this evolution will take years, if not decades, to complete. But faced with the expense and risk of flying crews to dangerous offshore rigs, the idea of oil and gas-gathering robots controlled by humans and computers in the home office is idyll.
And it’s certainly more appealing to an internet generation more adept with handsets than hand tools. A great digital transformation is taking place, and its coincidence with the great crew change could not be more convenient.