THIS year’s Offshore Technology Conference (OTC) was the setting for another global technology summit, led by Aberdeen-headquartered ITF. Key technology organisations from the world’s major oil&gas provinces came together for a breakfast on the second day of the show in Houston to share updates on current programmes.
Even though the Brazil delegation of Petrobras pulled out of the show, the country’s important Procap programme was represented at the session.
Besides Procap, the breakfast attracted the US’s DeepStar project; the US Department of Energy-sponsored RPSEA programme; Norway’s Petromaks and DEMO 2000 initiatives, and Petroleum Research Atlantic Canada (PRAC). All are funding bodies for offshore, upstream oil&gas technology development.
In a bid to fast-track new technology to recover the remaining reserves worldwide, it was ITF that hosted the first summit of this grouping in Aberdeen in October, 2008.
That allowed the various facilitators to examine and understand how transfer and dissemination of their combined knowledge would increase the value of existing technology research, development and deployment.
Designed primarily as a forum to explore collaborative opportunities and bring forward the next new wave of oil&gas technologies by leveraging global resources, the summit has already delivered results.
After the Aberdeen meetings, PRAC supported ITF to screen a range of proposals received in response to ITF’s Arctic Challenges theme. Response to this call for proposals was the largest ever seen by Neil Poxon and his team.
He told Energy that support through the screening process was therefore invaluable and allowed ITF to understand better what technology in this area already exists in other regions and how to maximise output from the call. It emerged, too, that there are, potentially, Arctic-related collaboration opportunities.
Importantly, the summit, led by ITF’s David Liddle, unveiled a strong desire from the participative organisations to organise a global industry event to focus on and address one key major industry challenge.
“Looking ahead, there are a number of ‘low hanging’ fruit, but the desire is to tackle a larger industry issue where the benefits of collaboration can be truly realised,” he told Energy.
“One of the biggest costs for the global exploration and production sector is drilling and completions, so new technology is desperately required in this area to maximise efficiency and manage costs. This is therefore likely to be a theme that the summit will tackle together, although discussions are continuing.
“To effectively work in collaboration is a challenge in itself, though, and it’s important we understand how to work together to achieve global integration. The intent is to build a technology road map to initially define the challenges. This will map out where we wish to get to as an industry and try and eliminate the gaps and challenges on the route to achieve the ultimate goal – streamlined global technology development.
“Greater collaboration between industry, academia and government is, however, required to deliver the game-changing technologies needed to extract the remaining hydrocarbons, adding value to the global industry and ensuring security of supply with due regard to the environment and safety.
“Input and involvement from the wider industry is key to this and, although we’re in the early stages just now, the potential for organising a major joint international event, sponsored by all the organisations that make up the global technology summit, to share knowledge and information in an interactive setting was discussed.”
The summit group will continue to meet regularly by teleconference and will have its next round-table gathering in Q3 this year.
This next formal meeting is intended to take the form of a planning forum to establish a major joint international workshop that could potentially take place as soon as spring 2010.
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