Game Changing Tech for Opex Challenged Oil and Gas Leaders

Industries across the board are immediately mobilizing programs to support employees and execute on business continuity plans (BCP), typically a ‘Phase 1’ effort amidst catastrophic event response. Oil and gas companies are in a particularly volatile place for traditional ‘Phase 2’ planning. This is where organizations shift focus to medium- and longer-term business strategies considering financial modeling and organization restructuring. This is in part due to fallouts of the recent failed OPEC negotiations, where oil prices saw the largest single day drop since 1991 adding increased pressure for teams to increase productivity through technology, a key theme called out in top ten 2020 Oil and Gas predictions.

Some of the takeaways most interesting in how oil and gas companies are betting, and now perhaps doubling down, on tech to achieve business objectives include:

1. Investment in quantum computing for exploration and operations optimization
2. Investing in digital twins, automation and drones for sub-sea processing and drilling strategy, supporting 100% unmanned offshore processing facilities and for pipeline asset data collection respectively
3. Moving majority of on-premises applications to the cloud to facilitate scalability and digital innovation
4. IoT implementation to create data feeds to inform systems and processes
5. Digital Field Management SaaS applications investment to improve productivity and visibility in the field, and to pave the way for smart contracts and predictive capabilities leveraging AI

Oil and gas players can significantly benefit as digital transformation and network virtualization becomes more mature and the above programs are rolled-out. However, considerations like accessing compute and actioning on data from remote locations can prove challenging.

One consideration companies likely aren’t asking themselves is, “can I mobilize my engineering, data science and geology teams to carry out analyses without moving the data?” What if the need to move data became obsolete? Our Innovation lab has been working with global oil and gas players to provide game changing capabilities that allow customers to realize massive productivity gains while executing on some of the key IT directives listed above through a capability called Data Access on Demand.

This capability allows companies to act on remote data as if it were local, enabling access to quantum compute cycles while proprietary exploration data remains on premises; and when the preference is to move the data, that transfer is accelerated by a minimum of 17x. The team is working with leading research labs and has started to develop use cases associated with the first working quantum computer, examining ways to make early quantum computing resources available through the cloud and other network facilities. In addition, the CenturyLink Innovation team has digital twining on the 2020 development schedule and is actively looking for partner use cases to co-develop.

These are just a few examples of how our solutions teams are working with customers every day to achieve their innovation and technology goals.

We are entering uncharted territory, and many agree that from a BCP standpoint, technology is a key component. We remain dedicated to enabling our customers with the right solutions to power their global business.

Learn more about CenturyLink’s solutions built specifically for the energy sector.

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