We all know that digitalisation is helping to optimise the existing process and we have to continue to produce hydrocarbons because they will be the case for the coming decades anyway. But we have to decarbonise everything around digital, and find solutions about limiting the carbon footprint of all the digital activities. And I think that’s the centrist thing that we have to achieve as some of the players here are working on it and engaging with start-ups to make it happen.

One of the key takeaways for me was how we address the human element of culture, adoption, sponsorship by leadership in the companies themselves to move the agenda forward in terms of technology adoption. So I think it was really great to get a good understanding of where people are at and the challenge of getting everyone on the same page. (Mark Bashforth, CEO, OvationData) This year we’ve heard people say things like, I have to fly air cover on the most innovative people so that they don’t get dragged down by traditional organisational values and approaches. So leadership’s transitioned. Many of our biggest oil and gas companies, I’ve seen a huge transformation in leadership, and that’s come out this year, not just through the leaders who have spoken about their journey, but then they’ve had members of their team present. I think that’s the biggest difference from last year. Last year was people tooling up. They’d been working during the pandemic to lay the foundations and now suddenly they’re out of the gate and running and they’ve got leadership that’s backing it.

I’m so really looking, really excited about the connections we’ve made and the follow up conversations that will happen after the meeting.

A lot of the things that are happening in the interest actually around is absolutely fantastic and there’s a lot of development going on behind the scenes with operators and even others in this space that are working on tools and other solutions that are going to help in the future and coming back year on year and seeing how much they’ve changed in the background and being able to check back in with people and and see that evolution and revisit with some of these operators where they are now and the roadmaps and how much has changed has been extremely helpful because it means that everyone can reconnect at different stages of whether it’s in development side or whether it’s the operations side.