The digital maturity of the oil and gas industry is still lower than that of heavy asset industries such as transportation, telecommunications, banking, and industrial manufacturing. Unlike these industries, the oil and gas industry has invested only a small amount of available data into the decision-making process. Because a digital strategy can greatly boost their development, specifically, it can help unlock more promising values such as predictive maintenance, remote operations centers, dynamic energy selection mode, omni-channel retailing, and connected service fields. Oil Fields digitization can lead to saving money, higher productivity, lower water resource consumption, and smaller carbon dioxide emissions. The oil and gas industry is now standing at a crossroads and in urgent need of digital transformation.
In the first half of 2020, due to the global economic downturn amid the spread of COVID-19, international oil prices fell to a low of 30 dollars per barrel. In May, West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil futures prices even turned negative, a historically unprecedented event. Undoubtedly, the oil and gas industry has entered an extremely difficult period and is witnessing changes, the likes of which have not been seen for over a century.
Evolving from a vendor that simply provided switches, routers, and network devices, to becoming a full partner dedicated to providing digital transformation solutions, Huawei works with partners and customers alike to jointly promote the application of 5G, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and big data in the oil and gas industry. It continues to explore new technologies and applications, where solutions to the current challenges lie.
Huawei has proposed “Leading New ICT for Higher Safety and Efficiency in the Oil and Gas Industry” and cooperates with industry partners to launch ICT solutions covering the upstream, midstream, and downstream sectors to combine digital production with safety control and improve productivity. These innovative ICT solutions include oil and gas IoT, digital pipeline, HPC & operations management, and smart distribution. Huawei’s oil and gas solutions have been applied in 45 countries and regions around the world, serving 70 percent of the global top 20 oil and gas companies.
Huawei is empowering a wide range of industries through 5G networking. In the oil and gas industry, 5G technologies are changing the operation modes of seismic data collection. Huawei has put 5G network features to work — including high bandwidth, wide connectivity, and low latency — to help achieve high-speed backhaul of seismic data, reducing the manual cabling workload and significantly improving the efficiency of seismic data collection. Elsewhere, Huawei 5G networks are already being used in oilfields and stations to support robot inspection, drone inspection, and Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) applications.
by Dr. Jassim Haji