Interview - DDNS 2018, Dominic Grocott – Upstream Intelligence

Can you start off by telling us about Data Driven Drilling and Production 2018 (DDNS 2018) and what it is all about?

We put together DDNS for the North Sea market and this is all about data, digital, new technologies and how they're impacting current operations. It's got a real focus on what we're currently doing in our drilling and our production operations and how we can make them more efficient, make them safer, make them more collaborative in using digital technology and data analytics.

Data and Digitalisation is a huge focus for the Oil and Gas industry, what sort of impact are you finding and what sort of changes are we seeing in the industry now?

I mean you can see it in almost of the presentations across the two days here. Us as a company, we are focusing solely on data and digitalisation, it's what everybody wants to hear about, what everyone's talking about right now and where you know people are putting their time and their effort into generating new digital projects - seeing what's new, new technologies, what’s out there and how they can apply them. The exciting points are that people are really getting to the crux of their projects at the moment, so projects that were launched two, three, or four years ago. I mean, digital transformation has been going on for decades but real projects are now coming to fruition, where we're seeing people bringing real data, real lessons and stuff that they've actually learnt over the last year, year and a half coming talking about what they're going to do with it and what they're going to do next and that's a really exciting time for data in Oil and Gas.

What have you got in store for the future I hear you have some more events planned?

We've got the North Sea events obviously here in Aberdeen, then we focus on Houston and basically the whole North American market because that realistically is our biggest event. We get 750 people there and then in September we're going be over into the Middle East and will be coming out to Dubai for Dubai Centric View. So, it’s all the same data driven stories, same type of format, with Operators bringing in case studies and real learning, real objectives and real projects but each with a focus on Houston and focus on the North American focus on North Sea and a focus on the Middle East.