GE's Chief Technology Officer Says Standardization is Key to Survival
When it comes to the oil and gas industry’s most recent downturn stimulated by over production, Kishore Sundararajan is reminded of the 1980s, specifically the CRINE initiative, which is an acronym for Cost Reduction Initiative in the New Era.
During this time, oil and gas fields in the UK Continental Shelf had the goal of reducing industry costs by 30 percent.
“I think the most recent down cycle reminds me of the CRINE era,” Sundararajan, chief technology officer for GE Oil and Gas, told Rigzone. “But there are some key differences.”
Namely technology.
“In the CRINE era, there was not high computing technology at low costs,” he said. “The cloud and communications infrastructure we have today did not exist.”
As GE works in industry and with its customers toward standardization, Sundararajan said while it’s difficult, everybody is willing to do it to help the industry survive.
Technology Begets Efficiency
The good thing about technological advances in the oil and gas industry is that they can a) attract people to the workforce who historically may not have been interested (i.e. some millennials and IT professionals) and b) help oil and gas companies become more efficient in their operations.
“We are working with BP on a project called Plant Operations Advisor (POA) and increasing asset productivity on an offshore platform by running basic diagnostics and combining information from a variety of sources,” said Sundararajan. “We can combine data in a way that was not possible before and begin making insights from that data. Using those insights, we can start predicting failures before they happen.”
Technology such as drones can allow for safer operations as well, shielding workers from harmful situations.
“For instance, I don’t have to use scaffolding and get workers on top of smoke stacks. I can use drones,” Sundararajan said. “There are robots that fly, robots that swim and robots that crawl. With this suite of robots, I can now deliver inspections without putting people in harm’s way.”
The ability of today’s cameras to pick up what the human eye cannot means increased uptime and safer operations and flexibility for customers, said Sundararajan, who shared that he’s now able to do inspections whenever he wants.
This is also a bit of a cultural change for GE.
“For decades, GE supplied inspection equipment to the industry. But today, we have to change our mindset from delivering equipment to delivering a service using the equipment,” he said. “We have to retool the workforce to do things differently and think differently. All of these cultural changes are enabled by technology.”
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