Tech leader says oil industry needs to be less insular
These days, Big Oil’s arsenal of gadgets includes plenty of tech developed by industry outsiders, like robots designed by robots, MRI scanners and satellites that can see subtle gravitational changes within the Earth.
But it still takes oil companies too long to adopt technologies that emerge outside the energy sector, Royal Dutch Shell’s top technology executive said Thursday.
“We could do so much more,” said Yuri Sebregts, the oil company’s execu- tive vice president for innovation and research and development, and chief technology officer. “In oil and gas, it has traditionally been an insular community. More and more, we bring in other technologies, but I think we can do an awful lot more.”
He made the observations at a time when low crude prices have forced many companies to cut their oil exploration budgets, and when oil discoveries have come in much smaller and taken longer to find than they once did. Sebregts, who was
in Houston to speak at a space industry event, said in an interview with the Chronicle that for competitive reasons, oil companies tend to develop proprietary technologies behind closed doors. But embracing outside technologies to fit the oil industry’s need would be faster and cheaper than inventing tools from scratch.
“Companies in the oil industry have historically wanted to invent everything themselves,” he said. “There’s other industries than energy that have really cool technology that’s already available. So looking outside and seeing what technology exists that might solve your particular challenge in unlocking an energy source is often just a much quicker way.”
For instance, Shell uses MRI scanners to examine core samples from its oil wells, creating sharp images of buried oil rock. And within the last three years, it has started deploying drones to inspect the in- tegrity of burner tips at the top of tall gas flares at its refineries. That saves costs by eliminating the need to stop operations while an inspector gets to the top of a flare stack.
In the past decade, advancements in superpowered computing and satellite imagery have allowed geologists to peer beneath big salt domes that can obscure readings from older seismic technology.
Similarly, some oil companies are using software from the video game industry to create 3-D representations of the streams of data that come from sensors in the oil field.
Ultrafast computers also have helped oil companies figure out quickly what materials will speed up the chemical reactions they use to convert gas into liquids and other substances, ending the long days of trial and error in a laboratory.
And Sebregts said the oil industry has repurposed some technologies used in space travel for its global hunt for oil. For instance, oil drillers use some of the same scanners that space shuttles used to line up precisely for docking with the International Space Station. The devices employ a complex calculus that helps drilling rig operators thread drill pipe deep underground.
“The major act of drilling is just continuously connecting and disconnecting pieces of pipe,” he said. “So if you can automate that, it’s not only safer because the roughnecks don’t have to be close to it all the time, but also you can do it much faster and therefore cheaper.”