Ahead of ADIPEC 2024, we sat down with SLB’s MENA President Tarek Rizk to discuss some of the major trends in the Middle East energy sector — and their impact.

How are digital trends evolving in the region?

In the Middle East, data sovereignty laws in certain countries prevent the use of the public cloud. Not surprisingly, one of the key trends we’ve seen over the last few years is a transition to sovereign cloud infrastructures. Deals have already been inked between major producing countries in the region, including Saudi Arabia, and the big cloud providers — AWS, Google and Microsoft. This is what will really pivot the digital offering in the region, both in terms of scalability and adoption of advanced digital capabilities.

During this transition, however, our customers still need access to digital solutions, including artificial intelligence (AI) — which we believe is the X-factor for our industry to reach even higher levels of performance and sustainability.

During our Digital Forum in Monaco in September, we launched our Lumi™ data and AI platform, which unlocks access to high-quality data across subsurface, surface, planning and operations, increasing cross-domain collaboration and releasing new intelligence and insights to improve the quality and speed of decision making. This powerful tool is not only accessible on the public cloud but also on-premises, making advanced AI capabilities directly available to our customers in the region, irrespective of their deployment infrastructure.

What are some key trends you see landing out in the Middle East with AI?

One of the most important trends we see developing today is around bringing AI into operations.

For years, our industry has used AI to improve performance and sustainability for the planning phase of energy projects, but less so when it comes to operations in the field.

Today, AI and edge computing capabilities are making this a reality in the Middle East and stand to have an even greater impact in the future.

That’s really exciting! Can you give me an example of this?

We’re currently working with a major operator in the Middle East to deploy a smart production solution that uses AI and edge in combination with high performance compute (HPC) capabilities in country. When the project comes online, data from connected wells and gathering networks will be used to optimize the customer’s operations — without any human intervention.

The way it works is like an autonomous vehicle, where you have two connected AI-enabled computing infrastructures. One is at the edge to keep the car in the lane and the other is in an HPC cloud environment to process all the data points around the vehicle to guide it along an optimal route to its destination.

During energy production operations, the data intelligence coming from wells and equipment is comparable to the information an autonomous vehicle interprets about other drivers and the traffic conditions in the cloud. This information is then communicated back to AI-enabled equipment in the field to take proactive and autonomous actions that keep operations on the most optimal path.

Shifting gears, let’s talk about our recently announced partnership with ADNOC Drilling and what your views are on unconventional development in the region.

We are very excited about the Turnwell joint venture (JV) we have with ADNOC Drilling Company and Patterson-UTI, which is focused on accelerating UAE’s unconventional oil and gas program. The UAE has ambitious growth targets for natural gas production — and this project is a key step toward ensuring these targets are met.

The outlook for unconventional gas is promising not only in the UAE but also more broadly across the region. A recent Rystad report shows that by 2030, natural gas production from the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Iraq is expected to double from annual production volumes in 2024. What’s driving this is twofold: Gas is a cleaner burning fuel, so there’s a sustainability element as the region looks to power more of its infrastructure with gas instead of oil. Many countries in the region also have energy security target goals, which require more gas to be produced from their unconventional resources.

With almost two decades of learnings from our work in U.S. shale basins, including the Eagle Ford and Permian, and major unconventional basins in the Middle East, we feel confident in our ability to support the region’s unconventional development objectives.

Decarbonization and sustainability continue to be major global themes — how is this shaping up in the Middle East?

Water is one of the region’s most scarce and most precious resources. During energy extraction operations, salty water, also referred to as brine, is produced with hydrocarbons. In many energy producing countries in the region, the produced water volumes are very high. Today, much of this water ends up being disposed of via underground injection or surface disposal, both of which have an environmental impact. With technology advances, however, there are new and exciting alternatives to reuse the water for agriculture, biofuels and sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), and salt and minerals extraction. Depending on the level of treatment, produced water can also be used to produce unconventional assets. At SLB, we are deploying a wide range of solutions to reuse water produced during energy operations, including for industrial reuse and production optimization.

Beyond water reuse, carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) and geothermal are also key players in the low-carbon energy equation in the Middle East. Moving forward, the growth of these areas will help support a more diversified energy mix and regional decarbonization ambitions.