Looking back over 2025 upstream IT, our subject of predilection could be categorized as navel gazing. This is not surprising in that with oil at around $60 there is probably not much money around for grandiose projects. Yes I am thinking about OSDU, the open software data universe, recently described as a ‘multi-billion dollar’ initiative. No, not real money, just a lot of folks’ time and lashings of ‘Snibbo. OSDU is taking shape in that major oil companies working to move their data to one of the cloud service providers now call the result of their efforts ‘OSDU’. Of course, instead of ‘open’ this is really ‘lock-in’. Previously the risk was of lock-in to one of the major vendor platforms. Now there are two tiers to the lock in, with the CSP acting as a gateway to whatever combination of vendor software is now running in the CSP’s cloud.
Does OSDU make ‘interoperability’ any easier? I suggest that the answer to this can be found in our report from the excellent ECIM data conference in this issue, where we hear how Halliburton and SLB tried to ‘interoperate’ on OSDU and found that OSDU’s ‘flexible’ schema made for ‘data gaps and misalignment’. Your mileage may vary but it is not likely to be better! At ECIM we also learned that ‘neither Halliburton nor SLB are going to rewrite apps to run directly on OSDU’. Which was after all one of the original hopes for the initiative!
Of course all of these considerations assume that the future is the cloud. I cannot speak for the IT departments of oil and gas majors but I do have my own opinion. When I was searching for an old email in Microsoft Outlook, my PC (to my mind an unbelievably powerful machine with gigs of memory and a large SSD disk) trundled on for some time until Outlook told me ‘We can’t find it … do you want to look on your computer?’ What?!!?? Of course I want to look on my f-ing computer where else? Users of Outlook and Office365 have been unwittingly ‘migrated’ to a ‘cloud first’ paradigm. For Redmond, the endgame is a back-to-the-futuristic scenario where our PCs are terminals to data in the cloud. The assumption is that fiber communications are ubiquitous, fast and always-on. Again, your mileage may differ. You may not event want Microsoft as the custodian of your data.
I have been writing Oil IT Journal now for some thirty years or so. I have probably seen too much. Younger folks than me come into IT with a fresh look at things which is commendable. In which context a shout-out to a young panelist at ECIM, Hua Hong-Ngan who’s NTNU PhD Thesis was titled ‘Strategic deadlock in platform ecosystems: A case study of the OSDU data platform’. Hong-Ngan questions several shibboleths of data management, notably the wisdom or otherwise of ‘breaking down the data silos’. She also calls for better recognition of the mutual dependencies of operators and vendors. Which is pretty well what Zack Warren (Velocity Insights) says in our interview also in this issue. We report briefly from Hong-Ngan’s ECIM talk in this issue and plan next to provide a thorough look at her PhD thesis in our next issue.
One other thing we have seen before and indeed reported on probably too much over the years is the ontological – semantic – knowledge graph approach to data. This has recently risen (from the dead?) and popped up in places like OSDU, with a call from Equinor to retool the OSDU data platform using semantic web style triplets. And also in CFIHOS (the capital facilities information handover standard) where some are pushing for a return to the ontological approach of ISO 15926. This is curious since CFIHOS started as an attempt to move away from semantic esoterica in a move to Excel! On LinkedIn there is a constant push for more ‘semantics’ from a cohort of #influencers, some working in oil and gas. Ontology has returned to its quasi-religious status of circa Y2K when the great Tim Berners-Lee first ‘spun the semantic web’!
AI/ML/ChatGPT continues to excite although hallucinations remain a problem. These can be avoided with judicious use of domain-specific training data, leading to an ecosystem of advisory prompt engineering services as we learned at the 2025 EAGE.
2025 saw a shift in the oil and gas discourse. Previously the majors went some ways along the road of the energy transition. Not necessarily with hard investment, although some did, but at least by promoting the ‘sustainability’ meme. But this year, Trump has changed all this. At the EAGE we learned that ‘the energy transition has failed completely’. The reality is that for most working in oil and gas, the energy transition was never really a thing. At the 2007 SPE ATCE in Anaheim George Chilingar’s talk on how ‘Humans are nor responsible for global warming’ was greeted by an enthusiastic audience of HGW unbelievers. Earlier this year SPE President Olivier Houzé asked ‘Are we on the right side of history?’ Houzé thinks we are. I’m not so sure. But it is cold right now, my home is heated by kerosene and as for heat pumps … let’s not go there.
This article is approximately 735
words long. Click here
if you would like to receive a complimentary copy. This offer is discretionary and
limited to one article per month for non-subscribers to Oil IT Journal.
This article is approximately 283
words long. Click here
if you would like to receive a complimentary copy. This offer is discretionary and
limited to one article per month for non-subscribers to Oil IT Journal.
This article is approximately 797
words long. Click here
if you would like to receive a complimentary copy. This offer is discretionary and
limited to one article per month for non-subscribers to Oil IT Journal.
This article is approximately 848
words long. Click here
if you would like to receive a complimentary copy. This offer is discretionary and
limited to one article per month for non-subscribers to Oil IT Journal.
This article is approximately 450
words long. Click here
if you would like to receive a complimentary copy. This offer is discretionary and
limited to one article per month for non-subscribers to Oil IT Journal.
This article is approximately 4935
words long. Click here
if you would like to receive a complimentary copy. This offer is discretionary and
limited to one article per month for non-subscribers to Oil IT Journal.
This article is approximately 630
words long. Click here
if you would like to receive a complimentary copy. This offer is discretionary and
limited to one article per month for non-subscribers to Oil IT Journal.
This article is approximately 861
words long. Click here
if you would like to receive a complimentary copy. This offer is discretionary and
limited to one article per month for non-subscribers to Oil IT Journal.
This article is approximately 480
words long. Click here
if you would like to receive a complimentary copy. This offer is discretionary and
limited to one article per month for non-subscribers to Oil IT Journal.
This article is approximately 601
words long. Click here
if you would like to receive a complimentary copy. This offer is discretionary and
limited to one article per month for non-subscribers to Oil IT Journal.
This article is approximately 1236
words long. Click here
if you would like to receive a complimentary copy. This offer is discretionary and
limited to one article per month for non-subscribers to Oil IT Journal.
This article is approximately 333
words long. Click here
if you would like to receive a complimentary copy. This offer is discretionary and
limited to one article per month for non-subscribers to Oil IT Journal.
This article is approximately 356
words long. Click here
if you would like to receive a complimentary copy. This offer is discretionary and
limited to one article per month for non-subscribers to Oil IT Journal.
This article is approximately 409
words long. Click here
if you would like to receive a complimentary copy. This offer is discretionary and
limited to one article per month for non-subscribers to Oil IT Journal.
This article is approximately 705
words long. Click here
if you would like to receive a complimentary copy. This offer is discretionary and
limited to one article per month for non-subscribers to Oil IT Journal.
This article is approximately 748
words long. Click here
if you would like to receive a complimentary copy. This offer is discretionary and
limited to one article per month for non-subscribers to Oil IT Journal.
This article is approximately 179
words long. Click here
if you would like to receive a complimentary copy. This offer is discretionary and
limited to one article per month for non-subscribers to Oil IT Journal.