Industry experience with joint projects in recent years shows that it is possible to collaborate over innovative solutions and services which yield high value for the individual company, and which can be shared and used across the oil and gas community.
Very good results can be demonstrated by the industry in this way.
Norwegian Oil and Gas has therefore been asked by its members to facilitate more collaboration projects. While the companies previously preferred to pursue their own course, they are now much more interested in standardised solutions. The association is therefore taking an active role in serving as a prime mover for such inter-company collaboration.
“The companies on the Norwegian continental shelf [NCS] compete over finding, producing and selling the oil and gas resources,” observes Anniken Hauglie, director general of Norwegian Oil and Gas.
“We can collaborate over everything else, and find common solutions. So the companies are sharing far more data than before. This is also something welcomed by the suppliers, who will therefore be involved as well in the work.
“Everyone sees the opportunities offered by eliminating special approaches where standard solutions are fully satisfactory. We also see a possible health, safety and environmental gain in this, through increased use of standard solutions which people are trained on and which are therefore familiar to parties involved.”
Øystein Arvid Håland joined Norwegian Oil and Gas last autumn to lead the work of being a driver for new collaborative solutions in the industry. On loan from Equinor, where he was vice president for safety and sustainability, Håland has long and extensive experience of the petroleum sector.
He will head a broad-based group drawn from both operator and supplier companies which is intended to collect ideas from the industry, mature them and facilitate the choice of those which are to be pursued as projects.
“A big potential exists today for increasing value creation through cooperation,” Håland says about his new role as team lead in the Norwegian Oil and Gas collaboration project for strengthening competitiveness and digitalisation in the industry. “The goal is to speed things up and improve implementation in every phase.”
The main criterion in assessing whether an initiative should become a project is a very substantial opportunity for value creation and impact. That could involve financial value (increased revenues or cost reductions), improved safety, the effect on process efficiency and reduced environmental impact.
This work will be entrenched in the Norwegian Oil and Gas Operations Committee, and pursued in cooperation with the association’s department for operations and digital collaboration and with the Digital Forum, which brings together the member companies.
