Energy giants need to smarten up their act in North Sea

“The current plans will get us to about eight and ten billion barrels. If you want to do the remainder you need decent oil prices and a huge amount of technology and innovation.

“This is not a case of ‘do we need it or would it be nice to have?’. It is a must-do for the North Sea. The urgency has gone up dramatically, as the industry needs it now.”

Drones and other remotely operated vehicles are already a part of the oil and gas landscape but their adoption seems certain to grow in the years ahead. Cyberhawk, a company based in West Lothian but with an international presence, is the market leader in drone inspection in the North Sea.

Craig Roberts, the chief executive, said that its oil and gas business doubled in size in its most recent financial year and he expects further contract wins as operators seek to trim costs around the world. The company will open in the United States this year and already has customers across Africa, Europe, Asia and the Middle East.

Mr Roberts used an example of a flare inspection done for Royal Dutch Shell in Nigeria that took four days to complete. As drones were used there was no need to shut down infrastructure and the oil major saved about $11 million.

Remotely operated vehicles are a feature of pipeline maintenance and subsea work, but that is likely to be enhanced as those devices become more adaptable and able to perform more complex tasks, while other robotics may be able to carry out certain types of inspection work.

The sector produces vast amounts of data but many believe that it has only scratched the surface in being able to utilise that information properly.

Professor de Leeuw, who has worked for Shell, BP and Centrica and is also on the board developing the Oil & Gas Innovation Centre in Aberdeen, believes that big data mining and analytics can be hugely influential in many areas.

He said: “We have a huge amount of seismic information in the North Sea. Manually we can’t check all the data. But if you take these characteristics and put them in a smart data analyser then you might find the characteristics appearing five or ten times in the basin. So before you know it you have some fields you never knew were there.”

Companies are also working together to look at the small and stranded pools that are known about in the North Sea. It is estimated that up to three billion barrels of oil exist in these smaller fields, which have until now been uneconomic to exploit.

The Marginal Field Consortium, which includes companies such as Arup, Kongsberg, Apollo, Aibel and RMRI, is working on several ways of using unmanned facilities, from buoys to more typical platforms, to reduce production costs.

Patrick O’Brien, the chief executive of the Industry Technology Facilitator, said that improvements around subsurface imaging and drilling would be needed to take advantage of these stranded pools. He said: “We have been constructing wells in much the same way for the past 30 years. You are beginning to see evolution with slimmer wells with not so many cases. There are big efforts to automate the whole drilling process to speed it up and make it more cost effective.”

Arria NLG is an AIM-listed company that uses natural language generation technology developed at the University of Aberdeen to translate complex data sets into readable text and graphics. Its technology has been used by Shell in the Gulf of Mexico for health and safety monitoring but has yet to gain significant traction in the wider industry.

Emerson has also recently launched a £20 million remote monitoring facility in Aberdeen that uses sensors and satellite signals to follow performance on 20 North Sea structures.

The use of drones in the oil industry is certain to increase in the future

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Bob Ruddiman, global head of energy at Pinsent Masons, the law firm, believes now is one of the best times for companies to offer something different to the oil industry. “The trauma the oil industry has undergone recently means this is the time to harness efficiency and innovation. So any disruptive technology would be welcomed but, that said, one of the biggest challenges has been proving the technology.”

Proving technology could hold the key to another way for the UK to sustain an oil and gas industry beyond production and extraction. The experience of operating mature assets in the North Sea will be of use to companies around the world as infrastructure in all basins starts to age.

Similarly, a head start on decommissioning could help British companies to play a lead role in that area. Professor de Leeuw said: “We have the opportunity to maintain an oil and gas industry here for the years to come even if we don’t produce as much oil and gas.”

The industry also appears to recognise that it can harness experts from other sectors. The Technology Strategy Board has held hackathons for programmers to see what new ideas they can bring.

Colette Cohen, Centrica’s senior vice-president for the UK and the Netherlands, recently told an industry conference that similar events at her company had yielded exciting results, adding: “We need more companies willing to adopt new approaches and deploy new technology.”

Mr Ruddiman added: “More and more people are realising that more of the same is not going to do it.”