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This author always welcomes the opportunity to highlight companies that are embarking on their journey to fuel oilfield digital transformation, since hydrocarbons are a cornerstone to civilization’s ability to function and raise the livelihood of billions. Of special importance is the opportunity to highlight IOCs that are continuing to push into the digital frontier as they seek to operate more effectively, and profitably, in the new “lower for longer” market.
Chevron has announced a seven-year partnership with Microsoft establishing the company as Chevron’s primary cloud provider, accelerating the application of advanced technologies including analytics and the Internet of Things (IoT) to drive performance and improve efficiencies.
Chevron Getting a Head Start in Its Oilfield Digital Transformation
“We embrace every opportunity that streamlines our workflows, gives us insights into more efficient operations and helps us compete,” said Joe Geagea, Chevron’s executive V.P. of technology, projects and services. “We already have a head start in digitizing our oilfields, but we want to accelerate our deployment of new technologies that position us to increase our revenues, lower our costs, and improve the safety and reliability of our operations.”
The Microsoft strategic partnership is part of Chevron’s overall digitization initiative, a multi-year effort to streamline information technology (IT) operations around a digital core connecting the company’s engineers and operations through nimble analytics and increased automation. Adoption of Microsoft’s Azure platform will allow Chevron’s IT workforce to evolve from supporting infrastructure to one that enables more advanced technologies, as well as optimize exploration, reservoir management, production operations, midstream logistics and marketing operations.
Advanced Technologies are Improving Lives and Powering the World
“Chevron has a long history of applying advanced technologies to develop the energy that improves lives and powers the world. We also understand scale, and the cloud at hyper-scale is something we intend to leverage for agility and efficiency. Through this strategic partnership, we believe Chevron will have a competitive advantage,” said Bill Braun, chief information officer. “The volumes and velocity of real time data we obtain from the reservoir through refineries to the retail pump grows at a dramatic pace every year. Our Microsoft relationship will advance our high-performance computing, IoT, and help capitalize on innovation in data science and machine learning.”
Collaboration Empowers Innovation
The strategic partnership also extends to broader technical collaboration that will allow the two companies to focus on joint innovation from a technology and business process perspective. This will include identifying areas to influence Microsoft’s roadmap of future products and where Microsoft solutions can help solve Chevron’s business challenges.
“With Chevron and Microsoft, intelligent energy meets intelligent cloud,” said Jason Zander, corporate V.P. of Microsoft Azure. “Our global cloud infrastructure – which has more regions around the world than any other cloud provider – will enable Chevron to leverage our capabilities across areas like high-performance computing and Internet of Things to become a truly digital business.”
ARC will continue to highlight and promote any, and all, initiatives and/or partnerships in which IIoT-enabled solutions are empowering companies towards a digital transformation. The business value that digital technologies can drive are real and the number of success stories highlighting the benefits is growing daily. Please join us in Orlando in February for ARC’s 22nd Industry Forum if you are interested in learning a lot more about how companies are deploying IIoT-enabled solutions for the better.