The 22nd year of EnerCom’s The Oil & Gas Conference has concluded along with the first Oilfield Tech & Innovation Day. The financial side of the conference featured three full days of dual track presenting oil and gas companies and oilfield service companies. The EnerCom Tech Day featured 23 presenters with luncheon keynotes by Flotek CEO John Chisholm and IBM’s General Manager of Chemicals and Petroleum Industries John Brantley.
In his keynote talk on Wednesday former President of Shell John Hofmeister answered the question “Is the Silicon Valley Taking Over” in a lively discussion of how the “keep it in the ground crowd” would not be successful in totally wiping out internal combustion engines for transportation.
Hofmeister cited three independent studies that came to similar conclusions about the penetration of electric vehicles. Bloomberg, Goldman Sachs and the IEA agreed that by 2050, there will be four billion automobiles on the road worldwide. Two billion will be battery driven and the other two billion will be internal combustion driven, fueled either by gasoline or ethanol or natural gas.
“The demand for mobility will drive power-source,” Hofmeister said. “A sudden takeover by public policy that says leave it in the ground—it’s not going to happen.”
“Right now there are one billion Watson users.” – John Brantley, General Manager Chemicals and Petroleum Industries, IBM. But the uptake by the oil and gas industry is slow. Brantley said the oil and gas industry’s use of cognitive systems will change the industry by allowing it to access the other 80% of available data that it cannot now use.
John Chisholm, CEO of Flotek—an IBM Watson user—said that by 2020 80% of oil and gas companies will do decision making based on cognitive computing.
“Geology matters: we’re just trying to take a little of the mystery out of it.” – Josh Ulla, VP business development for FractureID.
The next EnerCom conference will be in Dallas Feb. 27-Mar.1, 2018.
