Making oil and gas exploration sustainable through service design

We all know and talk about the emissions related to using fossil fuels however something that is hidden from plain sight is the amount of carbon emitted to extract oil and gas. As per the World Energy Outlook 2023 report from the International Energy Agency, “oil and gas operations account for around 15% of total energy-related emissions globally, the equivalent of 5.1 billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions” This is a huge number and looking at the transition strategy of major oil and gas corporations as well as government policy we can see that fossil fuel production and consumption will stay for a while before the transition to cleaner fuel becomes sustainable and economical for the public and industry.

So why is it still so carbon-heavy to extract oil and gas from Earth when we have been producing black gold since the mid-19th Century. The reason is that finding a reservoir rich of hydrocarbon is still a risky business and the cost of extracting that stored oil and gas can be even more risky and therefore prohibitively expensive. Having worked closely over the last two years as a Service Designer in the upstream business of a large oil and gas firm, I have seen very closely the growing focus on reducing carbon emissions while ensuring traditional commercial principles such as risk management and cost optimisation. A typical hydrocarbon field costs anywhere upwards of $2 to $ 3 billion of capital investment to develop commercially and then requires an annual operational expenditure running into tens of millions of dollars per annum. Similarly, any new producer or injector well that is drilled can cost an average of $40 to $50 million without any guarantee of getting oil or gas. Hence, decisions which have to be taken to create, maintain and sustain such assets don’t just come with an economic risk but also come with the added carbon emission that can’t be recovered.

So besides well-known initiatives like carbon capture and storage and lowering methane flaring, a lot of extra carbon emissions can simply be avoided by planning and taking the right bets at the drawing stage of exploration. Advanced statistical and physics modelling algorithms baked into a software application allow a range of professionals involved in reservoir modelling to pinpoint exactly how and where to extract hydrocarbon. Hence the more accurately an organisation is able to model the properties of the sub-surface of a field, the lesser the economic risk it will carry in exploration and production activities. When the economic risk is in hundreds of millions of dollars it does substantially equate to a huge carbon efficiency opportunity.

If it is this much obvious then where is the catch? Similar to any other business process, this modelling activity also tends to have a workflow however that is where the difference ends with a typical enterprise business process. The scale and complexity of these workflows is about 20x times more than a typical enterprise business workflow across any other industry that I have worked in. It is no surprise that even expert users of this domain, struggle with the software application while working against time to deliver the critical decisions that the business demands.

Here lies the typical service design challenge, which is to look at the software application and the ecosystem around it from a service perspective and see how it can meet the primary business outcome of delivering decisions that minimise economic risk when making a large capital or operational expenditure.

We started looking at this challenge from the perspective of users of the application and their context. We tried telling our product and engineering team and users about user-centered design but the more we preached the more they got alienated as didn’t see as a part of them and questioned our reasoning. We soon realised that the domain and the application wasn’t unlike any other typical B2B or functional enterprise application and we had to understand the complex reservoir modelling domain and try out the application ourselves to bridge the gap between our users, product and us. This was a huge benefit both to product and engineering teams and users as we demonstrated that we could translate complex user needs into simple product language and that we could talk to users within the realms of their domain without using too many UCD cliches.

Today we are at the forefront of making complex modelling activities more user-centric and therefore making them more accessible and understandable to a wide range of business users. Our work has been recognised as having a huge impact in delivering better, faster and informed decision making, using the vast and rich physics and mathematical modelling capabilities required for optimised and efficient exploration activities.