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While digital innovation is expected to disrupt the energy space, it will bring in positive benefits to the industry by raising security and safety levels, said a senior executive at Abu Dhabi’s state fund during the ADIPEC forum held in the UAE capital.
“On top of safety, digital innovation in the energy industry helps with the security of facilities especially in light of the recent events in the region in the last few months. We have a company which is part of Mubadala that is specialized in aerospace, deployment of drones and artificial intelligence to ensure that the facilities are secure,” Musabbeh Al Kaabi, CEO, Petroleum and Petrochemicals, Mubadala Investment Company said.
As for the safety advantages of the technological innovation in the oil and gas sector, Al Kaabi said that looking at safety records, most of the errors in the industry is related to human behavior.
“So if you can somehow eliminate the human error and replace it with artificial intelligence, you can significantly improve the safety records in the industry,” he added.
In September, oil major Saudi Aramco faced drone attacks on its plants that halved the crude output of the world’s top oil exporter.
Al Kaabi who manages an integrated portfolio of oil and gas for Mubadala, talked about the future of oil and how technology can play a crucial role in the industry.
“The outlook for the oil demand is still positive going forward, but by 2030, we see a potential drop in demand driven by technology in the transportation sector, and also customer behavior driven also by government policies,” he said.
“It is very important that we treat this industry as the industry of the future not only the industry of the past, and the technology will play a major role by helping us position it on the right track,” he added.
The major challenges for the energy industry currently are climate change and ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) issues, according to Al Kaabi.
“I know that our industry is now labour intensive, and we still have significant footprint especially CO2, but I think that there is significant room for technology to minimize the emissions problem,” he said.
“We are investors in different sectors in technology… so we foresee trends that could potentially impact our conventional industries such as oil and gas. Being part of these technologies and understanding the potential trends enables us to constantly adjust our strategy,” he said.
“We see a significant space of use of some technologies in preventive maintenance in the oil and gas sector through utilization of drones and artificial intelligence,” he added.
Mubadala earlier this year incubated a technology hub called ‘Hub 71’ and committed up to 1 billion dirhams ($272 million) to support technology start-ups, with technology giant Microsoft involved as a strategic partner.
(Writing by Nada Al Rifai; Editing by Seban Scaria)
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