What’s your take on Intelligent Energy’s future?
We are faced
with the challenge of the pace of change of technology and facilities
that will still be there in 30 years time. We need to keep our systems
upgraded and in synch as technology evolves.
Is this possible?
Not entirely
but we can anticipate trends. Currently we have multiple devices but
the future may see convergence to a single handheld device performing
multiple functions—hence the need for device-independent solutions.
Not long ago BP was betting the house on Microsoft’s ecosystem.
This is still
pretty much the case. We need a platform for integration although this
is something of a dilemma. We want to minimize the field of the future
footprint and make it easier to follow the roadmap, to focus on
automation and take humans out of the process.
So there will be jobs lost?
We will need
more information engineers. But we need more autonomy at the coal face.
NASA’s robotics operate autonomously for tens of minutes. We still need
to come to a balance on this in drilling.
The approach has been tried, with the Autocon Rig?
There is
surely a happy medium that has yet to be found in drilling automation.
In other industries like automobile, it’s easy to automate a plant. It
is harder in drilling where we are faced with changes in rock types, in
fluid chemistry and so on. We need to be aware of all these in real
time.
Speaking of automation what about the contribution from the process control industry. Honeywell is at the show. A first?
Yes, and here
too we see convergence as large automation contractors buy up smaller
companies and expand their footprint. We are also looking to similar
convergence and automation in geosciences software.
How
is this organized in BP across all the stakeholders… the business (with
its own divisions of geosciences, engineering and process), IT and your
group.
A governance
group meets with representation from all stakeholders. We work on the
roadmaps and decide what commercial software to deploy and how to
converge.
Who is in charge?
Actually
there is an ongoing study on this issue as to whether to continue with
the governance group model or to take the whole process under the
umbrella of one team with a shared roadmap.
Our current editorial line is of IT inefficiency and the lack of real progress on productivity—what do you think?
There has
been progress, look how slick a software upgrade is, at least for
operating systems and consumer grade applications. We would like to see
similar ease of upgrade from upstream software vendors.
What about patches in the process world?
We are
working on testing geosciences software in our ‘innovation lab’ and
this will likely extend to the process world. We like the NASA paradigm
of pushing a software update out to a Mars probe. Maybe we will be able
to do the same to the well one day. Today, BP
is stepping back and taking a broader view of the opportunities that
‘intelligent energy’ offers across all its businesses, not just
upstream.
This article originally appeared in Oil IT Journal 2014 Issue # 4.
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