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I recently asked workers at an oilfield services company if they considered themselves oil workers, tech workers, or something else.
“Digital oil field worker,” one shouted with a smile. Nodes are traced around the room.
Those who follow the oil and gas industry may not be surprised by this answer. In the past decade, the process has mostly changed from drilling straight down or vertically to drilling at various angles, called horizontal or directional wells.
The push for greater efficiency in the oil field has led to the collection and analysis of everything from the geology of drilling sites, the operation of equipment and the engines that power it, to monitoring for leaks or other issues. Demands from investors and the public for more action on climate change have led to the creation of digital tools to track and report emissions.
This means oil and gas companies are recruiting more employees with advanced digital, technical and analytical skills. It means that technology companies are entering the oil and gas business.
Take Nokia, the boxy, push-button cell phone you or someone you know had about 20 years ago.
Jaime Lagana, who now heads Nokia’s oil and gas division, says: “Everybody is still asking me if I can fix phones, if I can let them play Snake again on their phones, but Nokia is a very, very old company. We have spent more than 100 years in the telecom business.
In the past few years, Laguna said, Nokia has improved its business offerings, and acquired French telecom company Alcatel-Lucent in 2015. He bought it in 2015. Alcatel Lucent already sells seismic surveys for offshore oil and gas drilling.
Laguna was with Alcatel-Lucent and joined Nokia in the acquisition. Nokia says it is expanding its supply to every stage of oil and gas production, from the well to the refinery.
“So if you need a private wireless infrastructure — a big topic right now, a hot topic, a hot topic in the oil and gas business — we’re providing the solution,” Laguna said. “We’re also providing cyber security solutions. We’re also providing analytics. So it’s a process of enabling automation solutions in the oil and gas market.”
Laguna Oil and gas companies often work in remote locations but still need the Internet and other communication tools, especially in the oil field where more digital tools are used.
Nokia is certainly no exception. Other tech companies, including Amazon’s Internet business AWS, are developing artificial intelligence and machine learning tools for the oil and gas industry. In the year In 2016, .AWS helped oil major BP move to a “cloud-first” approach, meaning data is stored over the Internet.
Also, oilfield service companies that traditionally supply labor and materials to drilling sites are offering more digital tools. Houston-based Baker Hughes, Inc. It rebranded itself as an energy technology company in 2019, and companies like Schlumberger and Halliburton have technology divisions.
But Laguna Nokia isn’t competing with the oilfield services industry—often oilfield service companies are Nokia customers, buying the technology to run their digital equipment on the rig site.
Still, technology companies entering the oil and gas space have not been without controversy. In a report by an environmental group on the sale of Big Tech tools to Big Oil in 2020, Google said it would no longer provide synthetic data to energy companies to find and extract fossil fuels.
That could serve as a warning to other tech companies to stay away from oil and gas for fear of negative public sentiment. This same sentiment can affect hiring by oil and gas companies for employees with advanced digital skills, which gives traditional technology companies superior skills.
Digital tools and technologies are so integrated in oil and gas operations that it is clear that they are here to stay. And oil and gas companies worry that increased technology is helping them meet climate change goals.
What’s unclear is whether this message will entice the right companies and workers to work with the oil and gas industry in the coming decades, or if they’ll follow the same path as Google.
kyra.buckley@chron.com
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