The Strategic & Plenary Programme addresses a broad range of organizational and leadership issues related to digital innovation in energy. View the list of Roundtable Talks and Panel Discussions below for more details. Interested in speaking opportunities? Send us an email to discuss.
Marc Gerrits, EVP Exploration, Shell
Amit Rai, Managing Director and Partner, X Ventures
The energy industry is under significant pressure to move faster than ever before. Finding ways to improve efficiency and decision making while facing unprecedented disruptions to traditional business models. How can we collaborate while maintaining individual competitive advantages? What are the changing relationships between producers and other players in the ecosystem? And in what ways can we translate our strength in technology innovation to reinventing our business models?
Digital transformations are often hindered by cultural and organisational barriers. These can range from a lack of focus on value creation, legal and cyber-security concerns and challenges in changing behaviour and incentives. Successful technology transformations must therefore also include a focus on transforming the people who interact with these solutions. This roundtable will discuss the crucial barriers that must be addressed for the industry to successfully embrace digital technologies, unlock trapped value and drive critical innovation.
The oil and gas industry must remain resilient for decades to come in order to secure affordable and sustainable access to energy even as we transition to more decarbonised sources. However, the industry faces a major challenge in attracting a new generation of tech forward and data science talent due to hiring competition from big tech, concerns over career longevity and negative social perceptions. This roundtable will focus on the ways in which the industry can meet the specialised digital talent demands required for a more vibrant future. We will also address approaches for upskilling existing workforces, restructuring teams and organisational approaches.
Dan Austin, Head of Business Development, ESA
Menal Gupta, X-Digi Exploration Geoscientist, Shell
Startup companies can play a crucial role in accelerating the pace of energy innovation. By leveraging lessons from the tech industry, energy startups can bring fresh ideas, agile approaches, and a culture of innovation to the sector. During this interactive session we will invite companies to share their journeys and discuss ways in which startups are driving innovation in the broader energy ecosystem. We will also ask how the oil and gas industry can collaborate with startups to usher in the next generation of energy innovation.
Sylvia Nordfjord, Project Leader Digitalisation, Equinor
Kaveh Dehghan, Innovation & Digital Officer Exploration, TotalEnergies
As energy companies expand their portfolios into new energies, a broader approach to geoscience and engineering data is required. Combining geoscience and engineering insights with other business and environmental data to break down workflow silos within traditional and new businesses. This will allow companies to make better analyses of their portfolios and maximise assets across organisations. The panel will focus on ways in which an integrated geoscience approach to digital transformation can lead to risk reduction, optimised production and more effective and efficient decision making throughout the entire integrated energy value chain.
Energy companies must change their business models to meet the challenge of bringing affordable advantaged hydrocarbons quickly to market while simultaneously investing in the energy transition. These challenges are becoming increasingly urgent as the industry is challenged with going faster, and cheaper while increasing trust. Digital investment can impact cost, productivity and emissions while attracting talent and capital. The roundtable discussion will examine the focus areas for digital and business model innovation required to enable future energy supply and energy transition.
The energy industry has the opportunity to achieve massive innovation gains by embracing new technologies and workflows along digital transformation initiatives. How can we leverage technologies to drive step changes in current operations and workflows? What are the emerging technologies converging to create opportunities for game changing innovation? And are we setting our sights high enough?
Quintijn van de Laarschot, Exploration Digitalization Manager, Shell
Ehsan Naeini, Chief Technology Officer, C3 AI
Digital innovation has the potential to transform entire ways of working allowing us to do more and better, with less resources. While there is no lack of digital initiatives or concepts, the industry still struggles in multiplying the benefits of digital technologies when compared to other sectors. This roundtable will highlight successes in scaling digital proof of concepts and address the challenges the industry faces in driving value and return on digital investments at scale.
The Paris Agreement is a legally binding international treaty on climate change. It was adopted by 196 Parties at COP 21 in Paris, on 12 December 2015. The Agreement includes commitments from all countries to reduce their emissions and work together to adapt to the impacts of climate change.
Our geoscience field has a very important role to help achieving these commitments by providing solutions to energy sector. Understanding and the use of data will play the key roles in this process.
To succeed, the OSDU will need to meet the challenges of modern energy industry and its operational requirements. In this dedicated session, our panelists will elaborate on their recent experiences, solutions to operationalize the OSDU environment.
Jeff Allyn, Chief Executive Officer, Studio X
Steve Freeman, Head of Energy Transition Strategy & Innovation for the Digital and Integration, SLB
Hydrocarbons will remain an essential part of the global energy mix for years albeit in a decarbonised form. In many progressive energy basins this decarbonisation of hydrocarbon production will happen alongside rapidly scaling offshore renewables and the integration of energy storage technologies. The panel will discuss the transformation of the vast network of legacy oil and gas assets and infrastructure into a more integrated energy system and the role of digital to enable more efficient, smarter and sustainable energy systems.
Jan Schoolmeesters, EVP Digital Energy Solutions, TGS
Ruben Hernandez, Solution Consulting Manager, AspenTech
Technological innovation can play a critical role in enabling and accelerating the transition to a net zero energy future. The convergence of digital technologies such as sensors, digital twins, blockchain and AI has the potential to reshape existing energy operations, enable the scaling of new solutions and track and monitor emissions transparently. What innovations and systems look set to change the energy landscape? And what are the environmental and commercial opportunities emerging in sustainable energy and decarbonisation efforts as a result of digital advances?
John Hudson, Consultant, AI for People and Learning
Cédric John, Head of John Lab, Imperial College London
Following a week of dialogue and ideas around digital innovation the programme will end with an interactive session focused on sharing learnings towards a net zero future. What do we think could be our next set of business models? What are the things we need to solve as an industry? Participants will be encouraged to enter solution mode, sharing ideas and contributing to a digital innovation roadmap for enabling the energy transition.
With the promise of a carbon neutral future, Carbon Capture & Storage (CCS) together with Energy Transition became one of the key focuses of today’s energy industry. It’s a challenging time for all of us, as we need to provide the energy needed for today, and at the same time ensure we have a sustainable plan for a balanced planet in future. It’s a race against time, and with conventional ways of working, it seems an impossible goal to meet. At the same time the energy industry is going through digital transformation and digital brings the possibility of increasing efficiency through smart collaboration, optimization, automation and insight generations. In this session we would like to discuss how digital can contribute towards successful Carbon Capture & Storage (CCS) and Energy Transition through: Improving efficiency through ‘new ways of working’; Help optimize the trade off between profit vs sustainability; Apply the learning of conventional E&P business into CCS & new energy; and What lessons can we learn from the existing CCS project?
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