Olivier Le Peuch has been both a witness and a participant in the industry’s digital evolution over his thirty-five-year career at Schlumberger. Today, as the company’s chief executive officer, he sees digital as a great “accelerator” for the industry to address the dual energy access and climate challenges the world is facing.

A pivotal moment

Speaking recently at Schlumberger’s Digital Forum in Lucerne, Switzerland, Le Peuch said “our industry is being called upon to supply the energy that fills structural supply and demand gap and keeps economies growing, while rapidly transitioning the energy system.”

It’s in the context of this dynamic energy landscape that operators must find ways to balance more economic opportunities for producing oil and gas with reducing footprint to meet net zero targets. Le Peuch pointed to digital as key to achieving this mandate for a “higher value, lower carbon energy future.”

“We enter this future better equipped with digital technology, which is a powerful tool for delivering higher value in terms of performance and decarbonization.” 

How it’s happening

Our industry’s digital transformation, which has been underway for many years, means that today everything can be connected—people, data and equipment. This is made possible by open platforms, which liberate data, de-silo operations, and enable automation and autonomy to optimize industry workflows that improve efficiency and performance.

Open platforms play another important role: Making multi-stakeholder and industry collaboration possible. This is vital to our industry’s ability to accelerate innovation and decarbonization to succeed in the future low carbon economy.

Today, companies both inside and outside of the industry are joining forces with Schlumberger to do just this.

Working together

At the Digital Forum, we announced our plans to collaborate with Aramco on the development of a digital platform that will provide sustainability solutions for hard-to-abate industrial sectors. The platform will enable customers to measure and report baselines, targets, emissions, offsets and credits, which will help them manage their carbon footprints more effectively.

We also announced our Digital Platform Partner Program and Enterprise Data Solution.

The Digital Platform Partner Program will enable independent software vendors to build new applications and software and offer them to the market on the platform. Customers will be able to access a broad range of interoperable digital solutions, enabling data-driven decision making across the energy value chain and rapidly accelerating the time to value.

The Enterprise Data Solution, powered by Microsoft Energy Data Services, will enable customers to integrate subsurface data with technologies and workflows from multiple vendors. Developed in alignment with the emerging requirements of the OSDU™ Technical Standard—the solution makes data accessible on an unprecedented scale for the global energy industry.

The takeaway

“The long-term competitiveness of our industry depends on our ability to effectively harness technology, data and deeper collaboration,” Le Peuch said.

Digital solutions are the foundation that make this possible. As the industry rapidly moves to a higher value, lower carbon energy future, digital will be both an enabler and an accelerant for our industry to economically produce the energy supply the world needs while meeting crucial net zero targets.