In Abu Dhabi, the Oil and Gas Industry Gets a Glimpse of the Future

Over the past 12 months, JPT has celebrated its 75-year anniversary through an anthology of articles highlighting the publication’s long legacy of sharing industry knowledge. Contributions from current and former editors, along with long-time collaborators, provided unique perspectives on the ideas and innovators that have shaped SPE’s flagship publication since its launch in 1949. We encourage you to check out the collection here. As this retrospective series draws to a close, we will sharpen our focus once again on what the future holds for the industry. But first, it’s worth quickly revisiting a period that JPT chronicled extensively in the latter half of the past decade—just before the energy transition became the upstream sector’s top talking point. At that time, the industry was nearly overflowing with excitement about digital transformation and conquering the big data challenge. Large operators moved quickly to hire data scientists, form analytics teams, and partner with emerging software providers offering machine learning platforms with sleek, user-friendly interfaces. JPT spotlighted startups developing chatbots and “cognitive” programs designed to help petroleum engineers retrieve critical production data or predict issues like sand production in wells. Some of the would-be disruptors delivered on their promises, while many pivoted to less-complex industries or faded away. Yet, despite the mixed bag of outcomes, their combined vision for artificial intelligence (AI) in oil and gas looks remarkably prescient, even if slightly ahead of its time. We are now once again swimming in industry optimism thanks to the rapid commercial success of large language models which have unlocked the productivity-boosting power of generative AI. The momentum of this shift was impossible to ignore at the recent Abu Dhabi International Petroleum Exhibition and Conference (ADIPEC) in the UAE’s capital, where the SPE served as the technical program organizer. Held over 4 days in November, the 40th edition of this annual event saw more than 205,000 pass through the doors. Event officials declared it a record-breaking crowd for an upstream conference—a milestone that underscores the relevance and resilience of in-person gatherings in a post-pandemic world. Beyond an unprecedented number of human participants, ADIPEC may have also set a new bar for non-sentient ones. Competing for space across the sprawling exhibition was a parade of four-legged robots, multipurpose drones, virtual reality headset demos, and holographic presenters—apparently based on real people and those digitally created. For seasoned industry conferencegoers, the sight of most of this gadgetry was nothing new, but its abundance likely was. ADIPEC also distinguished itself further as likely becoming the first upstream conference to feature a flying taxi, the recently debuted Tesla Cybertruck, and even a prototype of the electric carmaker’s yet-to-be-released humanoid Tesla Bot—albeit a lifeless, stationary one. But perhaps the most notable harbinger of things to come was hidden inside a 6-ft-tall server rack showcased on the floor by AIQ—a technology joint venture between the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) and Abu Dhabi-based tech firm Presight.