Nigerian oil industry operators should invest in technology – Huawei chief
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The future of the oil and gas industry is shaping up to be bright as energy companies around the world begin to recover in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic. And in order to make the most of this opportunity, Nigerian operators need to rise to the surge in demand by setting up a number of pressing policies and initiatives and make smart investments in cutting-edge Internet of Things (IoT) technologies.
Leo Zhang, director of energy department, Huawei South Africa region, stated this in the build-up to the forthcoming 5th edition of the Nigeria International Energy Summit (NIES) themed, “Revitalising the Industry: Future Fuels and Energy Transition”, scheduled to hold from February 27 to March 3, 2022.
Zhang noted that the push toward de-carbonisation is leading organisations and governments to become carbon-neutral by 2050 which will likely result in declining demand in both supply and demand for fossil fuels in the future, impacting oil and gas companies the most.
To offset the projected downturn, he suggested that industry stakeholders leverage new opportunities by investing in new technologies designed to ensure steady production growth of oil and gas fields, prioritising investments in health, safety, and environment (HSE), as well as environmental, social, and governance (ESG) initiatives.
According to him, doing this properly starts with a strong underlying technology layer that enables operators to overcome the common challenges plaguing oil and gas fields including difficulty to connect to wellhead data, the complications of managing multiple networks, inability to support multiple services with existing infrastructure, and suboptimal security and stability standards.
Zhang recalled that Huawei launched a new oil and gas field IoT solution, which was displayed recently. He explained that by using the technology, operators can build a strong data interconnection between wellheads and oilfields over an eLTE network, which provides one Mbit/second connections over a 15-kilometre radius, and a passive optical network (PON) designed to reduce cabling while delivering high bandwidth and low latency.
He stated that the IoT solution addresses a number of different scenarios associated with difficult fibre routing thanks to real-time presentation of oilfield production status and improved visibility to eliminate surveillance blind spots and increase oilfield security.
He further noted that the solution leverages IoT-based edge intelligence devices and artificial intelligence to process wellhead service data utilising edge computing, thereby enabling operators to “keep their fingers on the pulse” of their oil and gas fields from any connected device.