17-05-2017

Digital transformation of the oil and gas sector

The oil and gas industry has always been seen as conservative and resistant to change but, due to the recent drop in the oil prices, downstream companies are now looking at innovative ways to reduce CAPEX, and increase production and safety to achieve operational excellence.

The digital technologies and IIoT are seen as the main ways of achieving a wide range of key benefits.  In a recent survey published by GBC, the keynote speakers of the IIoT and Digital Solutions for oil and gas conference (OMV, Eni, Petronas and Halliburton) have mentioned that the mind-set change in integrating the IT in the overall business strategy and the breakdown of cultural and technical silos will leverage the speed of the opportunities in this sector and will deeply transform the legacy operations. This has a direct impact on the skills required in the future in the oil and gas industry as well, according to Ricki Koinig, Global Head of IT Strategy and Business Integration at OMV.

It is a common agreement in the industry that Real time resource optimization, predictive maintenance, energy management systems and personalised service at the retail points and integration of the supply chain make a difference for refineries and petrochemical plants. The best business decisions will be taken on the data generated in real-time from the projects.
To rapidly progress in the digital journey, the four experts presented the technologies which are on the table of the refining and petrochemical plants operators, such as: Wireless, fieldbus and open and secured systems, predictive analytics, machine learning, AI, IoT sensors, wearable devices and AR and VR.

Companies interested in hearing more about the digitalization roadmaps of the oil and gas companies, or in seeing technical demos of the solutions which can enable companies to approach the oil and gas projects in an entirely new way, can join the IIoT and Digital Solutions for oil and gas  conference, which will take place on 7-8th June in Amsterdam, at Okura Hotel.