Published on the 28/03/2018 | Written by Jonathan Cotton

Data is the new Texas-tea as a conservative industry wakes up to the value of IoT…

It can’t be easy to be a decisionmaker in the oil and gas industry. With environmental issues front of mind for the public, loads of regulation as a result of the same, high operating costs and increasing scarcity, one could almost have sympathy for the beleaguered leaders of the billion dollar industry.

Well, the squeaking wheel of the traditionally conservative field is about to get what’s coming to it: transition into a more enlightened age.

At least that’s what you could take away from a new report looking at the coming disruption of the energy industry. The report, entitled ‘Technology Trends in Energy’ examines the lay of the tech landscape in oil and gas and finds the industry wanting.

“The oil and gas industry is lagging behind others in terms of adopting digital technologies,” says Amir Boubaker, analyst for digital industries at GlobalData.

Boubaker says that energy firms are rapidly finding themselves in an ‘innovate or die’ scenario, due to consistently low crude oil prices, ageing infrastructure and outdated tech. Simply put, expect large-scale transformation, and soon.

And just how will that transformation play out? For one, in the ‘realm of the sensors’ (so to speak) but with new data crunching capabilities that turn that crude data into slick insights.

“The industry is no stranger to vast amounts of sensors decorating the equipment and machines, but the data captured has previously only be crudely manipulated for marginal boosts in operational efficiencies,” says Boubaker.

“But as sensors become cheaper and the ability to manage their data and gain insights from it becomes more mature, energy companies are looking to take their investments to the next level in order to gain a real advantage from this data.”

“As sensors and the ability to manage data becomes more mature, energy companies are looking to gain a real advantage from this data.”

And as the potential use cases grow more compelling, energy players are indeed implementing more IoT into all components of the value chain.

“Energy firms are looking to connect previously separate assets together, which is referred to as the Industrial IoT, to enable collaboration between machine, device and worker,” says the report.

“Deployment of affordable real-time tracking technologies can be paired up with the already low-cost sensors,” says Boubaker, “which can then be IoT-enabled and managed by an AI system to streamline production and enhance operational efficiencies.”

According to one estimate, 72 percent of energy companies have already adopted new automatic data identification (or ‘AutoID) and mobility technologies, with an even higher percentage considering investment in such solutions over the next two years. A similar percentage of energy companies say they are exploring investment in real-time location tracking tech over the next two years.