OpeOluwani Akintayo
Lagos — Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Timipre Sylva on Wednesday inspected global ICT infrastructure provider, Huawei’s newly introduced range of ICT solutions for the Nigerian oil & gas industry.
Sylva and others who visited the ICT provider’s exhibition booth while participating at the Nigeria International Petroleum Summit, NIPS 2021 in Abuja, were taken through sessions where one of Huawei’s Energy Account Directors, Raymond Wang, said the new ICT solutions would afford higher safety and efficiency in the Nigerian oil & gas industry.
According to Wang, the solutions will make it possible to speed up oil search and improve oil search accuracy, increase production and reduce costs, monitor oil depot data to reduce oil stealing and oil leakage.
“With emerging trends like Big Data, IoT, AI, 5G and Cloud, Oil & Gas industry players can improve oil well drilling efficiency and HSE management,” Wang said.
Huawei had hosted a forum to discuss how to drive data to barrel, and to showcase its leading new ICT innovations such as Oil and Gas IoT, Digital Pipeline, HPC & Operations Management, and Smart Distribution.
A third-party report had said the digital maturity of the oil and gas industry is still far lower than that of heavy asset industries such as transportation, telecommunications, banking, and industrial manufacturing. Unlike these industries, the oil and gas industry has invested only a small amount of available data into the decision-making process.
According to Wang, a digital strategy can therefore greatly boost development, specifically unlocking more promising values such as predictive maintenance, remote operations centers, dynamic energy selection mode, omni-channel retailing, and connected service fields.
“It is believed that this will improve the social values of the oil and gas industry — values include saving money, higher productivity, lower water resource consumption, and smaller carbon dioxide emissions. The report also made bold estimates. It states that the digital strategy is projected to create around USD $1.58 trillion of value for the oil and gas industry between 2016 and 2025. Undoubtedly, we can say that the oil and gas industry is now standing at a crossroads and in urgent need of digital transformation.
“Huawei’s mission is to promote digital transformation and reduce the digital gap across all industries. For the Oil & Gas industry in Nigeria we have several targets such as; improving production by about 5% to boost revenue and the GDP; HSE can be greatly improved to reduce accidents for a safer and more secure Oilfield; O&M cost can be reduced each year to 15 Million in total; Visualisation, Monitoring and Security Management of Pipeline and Full process of Oil Depot; Curbing of vandalism and Oil leakage for Oil Pipelines by providing innovative solutions which can monitor illegal operations in Oil Depot, thereby significantly reducing oil tampering; Ensure the E&P processing speed will be reduced from the average hour level to the minute level; Improve E&P processing accuracy, that is, E&P Data processing error rate will be reduced from an average of 10% to 2%; help E&P companies to find oil more accurately and faster to realise data to barrel,” he said.
In line with the Sustainable Development Goals, Huawei also said it has its focus on renewable energy technologies to drive green and more environment-friendly energy.