MEOS 2011 is well underway, with 795 delegates, 725 visitors and 1,733 exhibitors in attendance.
The exhibition and conference, held under the patronage of His Royal Highness Prime Minister Prince Khalifa bin Salman Al Khalifa at the Bahrain International Exhibition and Convention Centre, is now well underway, with the exhibition hall in full swing and a mix of industry and technical sessions attracting speakers from IOCs, NOCs and the world’s leading oilfield services companies.
Opening Ceremony
The Conference, kicked off yesterday with an opening speech from Dr Abdul Hussain bin Ali Mirza, Minister of Energy for the Kingdom of Bahrain.
Ali Mirza put the MEOS conference in the context of a world where energy demand is to grow by 36% by 2035 and an increasing – and increasingly developed – population is going to demand more and more energy.
“Everybody knows the days of easy oil are gone,” said Ali Mizra. “The responsibility for meeting the energy needs of the future lies in this room.”
Ali Mizra stressed the need for a more diverse engineering base in the future, and looked to a time when the Middle East will become a major hydrocarbons production and manufacturing hub for the East.
Shaping the future: Innovating Beyond Limits
That’s the theme of MEOS 2011 and senior figures at oilfield services giants and NOCs got to grips with it over a panel discussion yesterday.
The panel consisted of Amin H Nasser, Senior Vice President for Upstream at Saudi Aramco, Andrew Gould, Chairman and CEO of Schlumberger, Chad Deaton, Chairman, President and CEO of Baker Hughes and Sami Al-Rushaid, Chaiman and Managing Director of Kuwait Oil Company.
Amin H Nasser of Saudi Aramco spelled out the NOC’s strategic plan to become a fully intergrated up-to-downstream company, and to being expanding beyond the Kingdom’s borders to become a global player on the world’s hydrocarbons stage. Aramco is aiming to produce 2.5 bcf of gas by 2030 to meet local needs and free up more crude for international export.
“Innovation is not a precise science,” said Andrew Gould of Schlumberger. In pursuing research into new technologies, companies “should not be surprised by failure.” Gould also emphasised that, if the industry is going to meet its targets for delivering greater energy, “we need to drill a lot more wells than we have in the past.”
Looking to the future, opportunities are going to come from automation in drilling, Gould says.
Schlumberger, Baker Hughes and Halliburton have spent a combined $4.25 billion on R&D in the last year, a trend which is set to continue.
Nasser said the volatility in oil prices makes sustainable investment in new assets and technologies more difficult, but that upstream needs to break out from being a conservative industry. “A technology typically takes 10-15 years from invention to implantation,” said Nasser. “We should be looking at 18 months.”
Chad Deaton, Chairman, President and CEO of Baker Hughes, said regulations are going to be a challenge in future, and that the industry needs “to do a much better job of educating the public” about what the upstream industry does and how it contributes to the global economy. Deaton says the oilfield services sector has changed greatly in the last ten years, as the emergence of NOCs independents and even financial firms asking for services means Baker Hughes has had to respond to a much more diverse client base than the usual IOC relationship.
Gould said 80% of the project sepnd today is by NOCs and independents, making it clear that oilfield services companies have to be responsive to “whole new race of large independents.”
Macondo
The panel believed the industry had learned lessons from Macondo so it could not happen again. Andrew Gould said decisions were taken on the rig by lower-level staff that should have been taken onshore by more senior personnel. “Data on which decisions will be made will have to be transmitted to shore,” he said. “It’s unthinkable that a nuclear power plant for example could have been run in that way.”
Gas
Nasser said Aramco is “heavily considering” unconventional gas, and that the NOC is emphasising the need to provide natural gas for power generation, as “what we do not have in gas we have to burn in crude.”
Gould believes the shale boom in the US is not transferable elsewhere, and reminded delegates that around 85% of new gas exploration is from conventional sources and methods. “we shouldn’t get carried away by the ‘shale gale’.”
Other key themes were a greater need for companies to collaborate on and standardise their methods, the challenge of bridging the gap in expertise created by underinvestment in human capital in the 80’s and early 90’s, and the need to create systems that put key data in front of the dwindling number of expert engineers able to process it rapidly to make technical and business decisions.
The exhibition is now in full swing, and a program of technical seminars is underway. Look out for our day two update!
