According to a recent report by the consulting group, Rystad Energy, one hundred billion dollars of value could be saved with automation and digitization in the oil and gas industry. Yes, you heard it right, 10% of the estimated $1 trillion spent annually is the size of the digital transformation prize. In a quote from the report “in addition to cost savings, digitalization initiatives can increase productivity by increasing uptime, optimizing reservoir depletion strategies, improving the health, safety and environment of workers and minimizing greenhouse gas emissions – all which have significant value creation.” With that target out there, you would imagine that just about every CEO, CFO and COO are chomping at the bit to get their share of that prize.

So how is the industry doing? There is no question that the C-suite of every company has already launched their own version of a digital transformation program. Tech companies are all over the industry conferences hawking their new emerging technologies, some of which already work and some are more glitzy PowerPoint presentations. Management consultants are getting hired to staff and direct from behind the scenes these digital programs and CIOs are once again getting seat at the table by describing their “cloud-first” programs. But still, “Houston, we have a problem”. There is too much D (digital) and too little T (transformation) going on.

This presentation will provide our opinion on the current state of digital transformation of the upstream Oil and Gas industry from the perspective of the Hope (what are the business drivers), the Hype (marketing effort from tech companies), the current Reality (the pilots and the investments) and the challenges ahead (organizational change and data foundation). We will also comment on the training efforts for the next generation workforce of petroleum engineers and the reskilling continuing education challenge for the current workforce.

Digital Solution for North America, Sensia

Davis is a senior production engineer with 10+ years of relevant experience in various areas worldwide. He has ample experience building Integrated Asset Models for both scopes: long/short term forecast and steady-state optimization. His experience work focuses on implementing automated engineering process towards to Digital Oil Field approach, aimed at improving the efficiency and effectiveness of performing Field/Well Surveillance activities, Integrated Production optimization tasks to ensure resource sustainability and longevity. He is currently responsible for the business development of Digital Solutions for North America at Sensia currently based in Denver, Colorado, USA.

Staff Production Engineer, ConocoPhillips

Production engineer with 20 years experience in the oil industry working for NOCs, consulting and service companies as a Production Optimization and Completions Engineer. Work in well production optimization and well productivity includes well completions, artificial lift and stimulation. Extensive experience in reservoir enhanced oil recovery processes (EOR), high pressure and high temperature (HP/HT) and artificial lift methods. Able to contribute as an individual contributor or team member. Proven leadership skills in managing, developing and motivating teams while possessing analytical, design and problem-solving skills.

This session provides an overview of applications of data science to completions and geology data. It will showcase how integrating data and workflows makes it really easy to interpret relations between frac operations and geologic variations in the reservoir.

Explore building a paraffin prediction application, which is data analytics on gas analysis for paraffin prediction in the Eagle Ford basin.

Professor of Practice, Petroleum Engineering Department, Colorado School of Mines

Jim has over 37 years of experience working in the oil patch for Chevron. Now, he continues his involvement by improving the data foundation for Oil & Gas companies, which means anything around the management of petro-technical and geoscience data to unstructured documents and sensor and field instrumentation, advancing the capabilities of modeling, and advanced analytics as applied to gaining greater insight into the performance of the digital oil field/ integrated operations. His other passion is mentoring the next generation workforce or digital engineers, geo-scientists and information technology professionals, which he does as a professor at the Colorado School of Mines.

His business plan is to become a valuable partner for companies trying to advance their digital oil initiatives. He is partnering with firms, like Noah Consulting who already are helping clients with information management challenges.

Petroleum Engineering Professor, University of Houston

Before joining the staff at the University of Houston as a professor, Birol was the chief scientist of reservoir physics at Shell. He has over 30 years of experience in the oil and gas industry and it considered an expert in petroleum engineering. He got his Masters in Petroleum from the University of Alabama, a PhD of Petroleum Engineering from Stanford University, and an MBA from the University of Houston most recently.

VP of Analytics, Petro AI

Kyle began his career with Hess where he worked for 6 years as a production and operations engineer. Then, he moved own to start his own analytics company, Datafuel, which provided training & resources for analytics software such as TIBCO Spotfire. From Datafuel, Kyle was recruited to work for Petro AI as their director of Analytics. He quickly moved up from that position and has been the VP of Analytics for over a year. He got his bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from Texas Tech University and obtained his MBA from the University of Houston. His colleagues have noted him as hardworking problem solver, unafraid to roll up his sleeves and monstrous issue and find ways to fix it with better data application.

CTO and Founder, Seeq

After obtaining a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University and a Master’s Degree from Columbia University in electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Brian quickly moved from a senior engineering role to a VP of Technology role within 3 years. By the time he reached the 12th year of his career he was the President of Axxess Unlimited, where he served for 9 years. Then, he took on various roles at Honeywell and Ice Energy before starting his first spin off company, Ice Energy Technologies. Brian stayed with Ice for nine years before starting Seeq, where he is CTO today. At Seeq, innovative big data technologies are applied to transform industrial process data from sensors and instrument systems into useful information and actionable intelligence. This results in faster, smarter insights that improve execution, drive down costs, and increase earnings.

Production Technician, Shell

Kyle obtained his Bachelor’s degree in Petroleum Engineering with a Minor in Petroleum Data Analytics. He was also an Apache Scholar for Undergraduate Research, while there. He graduated and took his first role as a System Business Analyst for M&M Insulation in Oklahoma City. He held that role for 9 years before taking a position as a production data support technician where he has been for the last 2 years. He is a strong information technology professional with a history in the oil and gas industry.

R&D Manager, Well Data Labs

Jessica has been with Well Data Labs, Inc. for the last four years. She started as a Research Engineer and progressed to Research and Development Manager all after becoming a research assistant at the Unconventional Natural Gas and Oil Institute at the Colorado School of Mines while achieving her master’s degree in petroleum engineering. Before her master’s degree she worked in various locations in Latin America for Schlumberger and served as an account coordinator for sand controls systems in Italy for Baker Hughes. She organized the Big Data in Oil and Gas Meetup in 2018 and has been working to keep industry professionals in the industry connected by establishing a networking system. Her global research experience gives her top-notch insight to data analytics in the oil and gas industry. Her latest publication was on leveraging cloud-based analytics in active well defense projects and automated pressure response analyses.

Director of Data, Analytics and Applications, Centennial Resource Development, Inc

Mindy has been with Centennial Resources Development for about 3 years. Before coming to Centennial, she co-founded a data analytics company, Blue River Analytics, where she conducted Spotfire training for oil and gas companies and before that opportunity in her career she was a Spotfire Architect for Forrest Oil Corporation. She gained her extensive background in data analytics in the oil and gas industry after obtaining a bachelor’s degree in integrated sciences from the University of Denver and a Master’s of Computer Information Systems from Boston University.