Neil McNaughton ponders on the rather loud message from the London EAGE, that salvation for the oil and gas industry mandates carbon capture and storage. Well, that was the message from the plenary sessions. For those on the conference floor it was business as usual. Cognitive dissonance for anyone?
At the London EAGE* earlier this year, cognitive dissonance
was the order of the day. Moving from the plenary sessions (which we
duly report elsewhere in this issue) into the exhibition area we heard
one group of explorations geophysicists (for that is what the EAGE is)
discussing the threat of global warming, to the world, and to the oil
and gas industry, while another group (the exhibitors) carried on with
their usual business of oil and gas exploration. While wondering how to
editorialize on the above, I read Malcom McBarnett’s piece in First Break,
and thought that I would just point you in his direction where you can
read his take on the ‘uncertain future’ of the industry and the
‘impossible dilemma’ that faces oil companies.
Since the EAGE, industry sentiment appears to be swinging
steadily towards the need to address (or at least pay lip service to)
the carbon issue. An SPE-backed event in France, the Gaia Summit, asked the question
‘Is the oil and gas industry on the right side of history?’ What did
they come up with? A cute
diagram and a photo-op laden Twitter feed where SPE president
Sami Alnuaim effused that the group was ‘setting the stage for the oil
and gas industry to claim the pride and show the responsibility of what
we do: energizing the world, improving people’s lives, leading social
development and protecting the planet’. The Summit does not appear to
have published its findings but fortunately, Gaffney Cline was there in
the person of Nigel Jenvey who reported that** …
The oil and gas industry
are participants in a global energy system that is already
transitioning to be lower carbon, and we need to be considerate and
responsive to what society needs and wants. There is no silver bullet
to achieving this. It will require carbon management and the scale-up
of every low-carbon option, including […] carbon capture, use and
storage (CCUS) [and] will be the backbone of our future industry.
In my 2017 editorial,
COP23 BECCS, FECCS and the future of fossil fuel, I doubted whether the
world would ever be prepared to pay the cost of CCS. Sitting in on
Philip Ringrose’s presentation at EAGE I was puzzled as to how he got
to such a relatively positive economic take for CCS. In 2017, I
concluded that infrastructure costs made it unlikely that the world
would ever be prepared to pay the price. In an email exchange, Ringrose
kindly responded to my points (see below). Given that CCS is the only
way forward for low carbon fossil fuel energy production, it is
interesting to imagine what kind of plays would support the extra cost
of CCS.
But first, some more bad news for oil and gas from the green
energy movement. McKinsey’s Insights has
it that ‘by 2030, new build renewables will be out-compete existing
fossil fuel generation on energy cost in most countries – a key
‘tipping point’ in the energy transition’. Most countries will reach
this tipping point before 2025.
So, oil and gas will be squeezed, between cheaper, green
energy and the extra cost of climate-saving CCS. This means that only
the very
cheap resources will survive. What will the cheap fossils be? Well they
won’t be the oil sands. Shale/unconventionals will be squeezed even
more than they are squeezed today. Which leaves us with coal, although
that may seem surprising, Middle East oil and other cheap oil and gas.
In which context, back to the EAGE where WoodMac’s Neil Anderson
mentioned twice the ‘really low cost’ of ExxonMobil’s Guyana discoveries which are
conventional deep-water oil finds. So, there you have it, a glimmer of
hope for the geophysicists. Tempered perhaps by the way the seismic
business is going ‘asset light’ with Schlumberger selling its vessels
last year and now CGG!
* EU Association of
geoscientists and engineers. Previously the EU Association of
exploration geophysicists.
Schlumberger to open source data management system and ‘contribute’ code to The Open Group’s Open Subsurface Data Universe.
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Quantum computing in oil and gas
Total HPC guru outlines extensive technology watch program to track quantum technology’s potential. Potential applications in computational chemistry, materials science and (maybe) seismics.
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Letter to the Editor
Following his presentation at the London EAGE we invited Philip Ringrose (Equinor & NNTU) to respond to our 2017 editorial*, where we doubted the economic likelihood of carbon capture and sequestration. He kindly got back with the following.
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Book review - Linked Data: storing, querying, reasoning
A new book describes the evolution of the web into a web of ‘linked documents’ and the potential that semantic technologies have for making sense of it all. Plethoric, rather impenetrable, research avenues are described, as semantics meets-up with the big data movement. Making sense of ‘heterogeneous data from different sources’ appears to remain an elusive goal.
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PNEC E&P Data and Information Management 2019
Woodside’s seismics to the cloud. ExxonMobil/RedHat on automating data pipelines with OpenShift. BHP on AI-enhanced data management. Equinor moves seismics to Triton’s TerraStor on AWS. ExxonMobil’s digital transformation. ‘Pegasus’, Chesapeake’s Appra-based prospect and play inventory. ConocoPhillips’ ‘citizen data scientist’ program. Total’s DataLab. Kadme Whereoil for YPF. Shell on drone data onslaught. Blue Marble on major geodetic changes.
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Software, hardware short takes…
Safe Software’s FME 2019.1. Stratas Advisors announces TEXIS forecast. 3GiG announces Appra. ATEK’s TankScan. CGM Studio on subscription. DroneDeploy automates drone fleet management. Emerson/Paradigm’s machine learning rock type classification. Geolog 19 roll-out. ESG tests HPHT HotShot. ArcGIS QuickCapture. Geographics GeoCalc SDK 7.5/Geographic Calculator 2019 SP1. Troika launches GEOM 3D seismic dataset analyst. Implico updates SAP S/4HANA downstream. INT - J-Geo toolkit on Angular, IVAAP and Elastic Search, OSDU . Lasser’s free Well Info app. Sercel moves to MEMs. Target/Meera’s Hybrid sim engine. MRC Global’s MRCGO digital supply chain. 2019a release of MRST. 2019.2 release of PerGeos. Petrosoft’s information security certification.
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2019 ECN Oil & Gas Machine Learning Conference, Houston
Verdazo Analytics ML for geosciences. Lux Research’s ‘spotlights’. NETL’s SIMPA data-driven subsurface leak prediction. Machina Automation on office automation trends. BHGE’s digital drilling twin.
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EAGE London 2019
Plenary: Delivering the world’s low carbon energy needs. Geoscientists in changing energy landscape. EAGE Special Interest Community: Decarbonization and the energy transition. Schlumberger Delfi Developer Portal. 2019 EAGE Member Meeting.
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Folks, facts, orgs …
AADE, Bruel & Kjaer, BCCK , Eliis, Energistics, Morgan & Eklund, Okeanus, TechnipFMC, DNV GL, ATI, C-Innovation , Bracewell, Schlumberger, Calfrac, Helmerich & Payne, Environmental Partnership, ONE Future, Cheniere, RocketFrac, Aker Solutions, Data Gumbo, Pioneer, Hexagon, Produced Water Society. , Newpark Resources, OspreyData, Canada Oil Sands Innovation Alliance, ENGlobal, Parker Drilling, IHRDC, Purple Land Management, BHGE, Liberty, Total Safety, Helix, Aquilon, Landdox, Argus, Atwell, GRC, Katalyst.
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Done deals
American Energy Partners acquires Hickman. AspenTech acquired Mnubo. Competition Bureau OK’s Thoma Bravo/Aucerna deal. Drilling Tools bags WellFence. Emerson buys Zedi businesses. MicroSeismic spins-out FracRx. Endeavor Business Media acquires PennWell unit PNEC. Halliburton buys Promore. Sure Shot Holdings acquisitions. TechnipFMC to ‘demerge’. Terra Drone buys RoNik. TGS acquired Spectrum. Weir Flow Control sold to First Reserve.
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IBM Develops ‘world’s most powerful commercial supercomputer’ for Total
Pangea III, with 25 petaflops, 50 petabytes of storage and a hybrid CPU/GPU architecture, comes in at overall number 11 on the Top500 list.
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MQTT, OPC-UA, HTTP, REST ... qu'est-ce que c'est?
Kepware specialist helps Oil IT Journal get to grips with the novel ‘internet of things’ technologies that are gaining traction in oil and gas production and process control.
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HPC in O&G at Rice
Imperial College on Devito Python framework for HPC. Chevron trials seismic imaging in the cloud. Halliburton’s ‘generic and holistic’ distributed HPC. Nvidia on Rapids.ai, ‘open’ data science for GPUs. ExxonMobil moves multi-petabyte dataset across Houston. Shell trials latest AMD chips.
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Standards stuff …
API, IOGP sign MoU. ExxonMobil accelerates Open Process Automation standard. FERC adopts XBRL. PIDX releases Supply Notification standard. Data Gumbo joins PIDX.
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Safety first …
CSB tells API ‘create drilling alarm management guidance’ and ‘promote equipment data sharing’. Det-Tronics - gas safety standards/software verification. E2S sounds horns, flashes lights. Hexagon applies AI to driver safety. Schneider Electric announces Safety Advisor.
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Grant Thornton give Data Gumbo blockchain clean bill of health
Financial ‘System and Organization Controls’ (SOC) methodology extended to cover blockchain. Study finds ‘transparency of blockchain transactions negated by their complexity and nascence of the underlying technology’.
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Going, going, green…
Equinor to disclose Sleipner CCS data. EY finds world decarbonizing fast. Gaffney Cline advocates more carbon management support from government. BP’s Dudley on ‘net zero’. Shell’s van Beurden on ‘misalignment’ with API on carbon. Total joins EU 3D CCS storage project. Wabash Valley Resources kicks off Indiana CCS project. Aker ‘Catch’ contract for Twence. US DoE funds for CCUS. Energy Watch Group study finds 100% decarbonization possible. EU geologists and the energy transition. IEA tracks clean energy progress. IOGP investigates the physical risk of climate change to the oil and gas industry. ISB chair warns of ‘exaggerated expectations’ for sustainability reporting. Sabine Pass leaks ‘threaten safety and success of US LNG’. NETL report on offshore CCS. US NAP report on Negative emissions technologies and reliable sequestration. Shell Canada’s Quest CCS milestone. ‘Tipping point’ for renewables ‘real soon now’. McKinsey sees peak oil by 2025 (maybe). ExxonMobil signs with Global Thermostat. Silicon Kingdom’s passive carbon capture. Graforce ‘feces, the energy source of the future’.
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Back to school …
TOG/IBM to certify data scientists. Wild Well Control’s e-learning for drilling operations. Texas RRC to put more ‘boots on the ground’. Ikon offers ‘bite-sized’ e-learning for rock physics and reservoir characterization. GreaseBook’s artificial lift 101. Opto 22 e-learning for Groov/Epic and MQTT explainer video.
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2019 IQ Hub’s Canadian Wellsite Automation Conference
IDS automates wellsite reporting. DrScada on the wellhead manager. ABB Edge devices for the IIoT. Flicq AI at the edge. Epsis Team Box for Chevron.
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AI automates geoscience data management
2019 AI Paris conference hears from Total and Amayas Consulting on deep learning-based approach to document classification.
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Consortia – who pays, who gets the results?
University of Houston professor rails against non-sponsoring companies that manage to sneak access to his code base!
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