s many of the world’s leading oil and gas producers commit to carbon neutrality, the service industry is moving rapidly to provide the tools needed to help those companies get there. After all, operators cannot get there on their own—they need the tools and technologies that help reduce emissions and push forward new energy sources into the mix.

n November 2020, Varel International Energy Services (VIES) announced a new path forward, which included a new brand renamed Varel Energy Solutions (VES). According to the company, the “major reset” includes “a redefining vision for business growth.” The new strategy was announced three months after the company received a multimillion-dollar investment from Blue Water Energy. The deal brought on Derek Nixon as the company’s new CEO.

he year 2020 will be remembered for many reasons: a global pandemic, an economic crisis, a historic price war, negative oil prices—the list is endless. But despite the cloud of setbacks that overshadowed the oil and gas industry last year, digital transformation was a silver lining that accelerated at a pace never seen before.

Call it adaptive mode, survival strategy or just plain necessity; oil and gas companies, which were already making steady progress automating operations, accelerated acceptance of remote technologies during the pandemic when workforces were grounded and a low-price environment pushed businesses to do more with less.

n an exclusive roundtable discussion, senior executives with four energy tech companies discuss how the downturn has accelerated the need to adopt new technologies and how artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and analytics are shaping the future of the industry.

“The pandemic has changed the mindset of the executives, and right now everyone understands there is no way to run business without digitalization. More and more executives are considering digital transformation as the number one step,” said Michael Maltsev, CEO and president of RigER.

apan has been an early mover toward a hydrogen-based economy. Its roadmap includes developing a hydrogen supply chain, increasing the use of hydrogen across different sectors, promoting hydrogen technological innovation and public buy-in, and promoting an international hydrogen collaboration. The Paris Accord was a big driver, as was the Fukushima Daiichi disaster. The latter event resulted from natural causes (e.g., earthquake and tsunami) releasing radiation into the atmosphere and radioactive isotopes into the Pacific Ocean. Remember news of radioactive debris washing up on the shores of Washington?

onventional cores, or whole cores, are solid cylinders of rock that can be brought to the surface as a single piece. These cores are used to model reservoir behavior to optimize production, based on the analysis of core porosity, permeability, fluid saturation, grain density, lithology and texture. However, the process of obtaining and analyzing cores is a notoriously costly one, calling for rig time, crew mobilization to site and subsequent analysis.

onstant technological innovation in the oilfield drilling sector has driven the industry forward over the years. Through advancements in PDC bits, high-specification drilling rigs, MWD, LWD and rotary steerable tools, technical changes have helped evolve drilling efficiency, performance and well placement.

Despite these advancements, the focus on a reliable solution for powered and wired drillpipe has long been a significant challenge for the drilling industry.

he oil and gas industry would benefit from innovations that improve the recovery of hydrocarbons. In response to the current economic downturn, operators are seeking viable ways to alleviate risk and have more certainty on the return.

Many existing monitoring methods rely on seismic, an outdated procedure that commonly takes weeks or months to view processed results. Other indicators, such as production, tracers, FMI logs and pressure gages, give operators plenty of information about the success or failure of the frac stages, but retroactively.

lobally, oil and gas executives are focused on enhancing value from existing resources. This approach applies to all aspects of the industry, including human capital, physical assets and data. This is particularly important in production operations, where resource utilization drives unit cost efficiency and project economics.

s the subsea market changes, inspection, maintenance and repair (IMR) work is more typically performed on a call-out basis. Consequently, the use of ROVs also has transformed over the years. Today, ROVs are utilized as a resource that is more valuable and complex than merely a subsea camera and instead play a key role in the efficient maintenance of subsea equipment. As a result, ROVs are now expected to remain subsea for a long duration of time and must be able to withstand the demands of the harsh environment as well as perform a number of technologically advanced tasks.

t has long been a dream for offshore energy explorers to go where many have not gone before. That means searching for oil and gas deposits in deeper waters and farther from shore than previously charted.

Many issues arise from these special projects: safety, time and cost. Keeping offshore workers safe in harsh, remote environments is of the utmost importance as operators strive to maintain the same (or better) exploration results.

SUSTAIN’s biosurfactants can penetrate the smallest shale rock nanopores that other treatments cannot reach, mobilizing otherwise immobile oil and enhancing recovery in unconventional tight formations where pore throats are extremely small. Locus BE’s biosurfactants are less than 2 nm in diameter, significantly smaller than any other competing technologies, which increases penetration in the reservoir during hydraulic fracturing. Unlike traditional chemical surfactants, up to 50% of SUSTAIN’s biosurfactants are adsorbed in shale reservoirs and slowly desorb over time, providing continued long-term mobilization of oil after flowback. These ultralow effective dosage rates also ensure that SUSTAIN will continue to contribute to boosting production performance for months after application.

ccording to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), the Arctic could hold about 22% of the world’s undiscovered conventional oil and natural gas resources.

The area above the Arctic Circle encompasses about 6% of the Earth’s surface area. While the Arctic is about the size of the African continent, most of the resource area is oceanic. About 33% of the Arctic is occupied by land. Another 33% of the Arctic consists of offshore continental shelves located in less than 500 m of Arctic Ocean water. The remaining 33% of the Arctic is in Arctic Ocean waters deeper than 500 m.

he Alaska North Slope (ANS) is estimated to contain 20 Bbbl to 30 Bbbl of heavy oil. However, the development pace of that resource has been quite slow due to the high costs of development and the low oil recovery efficiency using conventional waterflood and EOR methods. Even after three decades of development efforts by multiple operators, the total heavy oil cumulative recovery from all ANS fields just reached 255 MMbbl, which was less than 1% of the total heavy oil in place in 2019.

he oil and gas (O&G) industry is at a significant inflection point where the force of market headwinds, cost pressures, environmental challenges, knowledge attrition and geopolitical uncertainty have converged. Fortunately, the confluence of potentially disruptive technology has landed on the industry at the same time. Collectively branded as “digital transformation technology,” cloud computing, edge technology, machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI), workflow automation, and Internet of Things (IoT) and data analytics are now part of every O&G company’s mindset, roadmap or even current portfolio. The timing seems perfect. So what is the problem?