illustration: ICOE Research Limited

A major digital resource developed for the oil and gas industry, has received GBP 50,000 from the Scottish Government.

This supplements the GBP 800,000 received from industry, the universities and other sponsors to enable the research, development and launch of this multi-disciplinary project.

The International Centre for Oil and the Environment (ICOE) is working with industry, academia and regulators to produce this authoritative resource for today and tomorrow’s industry leaders. This platform captures the accumulated knowledge and inter-disciplinary expertise of the last 40 years of offshore operations to transfer it to the next generation.

Entitled Encompassing the Future: Offshore Oil & Gas Operations, Environment Safety and Performance Management, the resource pulls together authoritative and researched material on the successful development of the North Sea offshore. Covering best practice, this digital resource will enable practitioners to meet the challenges of producing and operating safely and without harm to the environment in a cost effective manner.

William Cairns, Executive Chairman, ICOE Research Limited, explains that the resource will distil and develop the intellectual and operational expertise of the industry, and promote access and collaboration between industry, academia and regulators. It will create a safer, innovative and more competitive management approach to and facilitate evolution of best practice.

Paul Warwick, chairman of ICOE’s advisory council, says, “Against a backdrop of oil price volatility, a shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources and the gradual loss of experience in maturing and increasingly-challenging provinces, the global oil and gas industry is entering one of its most defining periods. The loss of personnel through today’s and previous downturns has created a gap in knowledge and experience. Our survivability and sustainability depend upon filling this vacuum.”

“ICOE’s resource will help close the knowledge and experience gap by providing expert guidance on the best solutions to the challenges of low morale, knowledge loss, ageing infrastructure and declining investor confidence as a result of the urgent need to bring costs to more realistic and sustainable levels in a lower for longer oil price environment,” adds Warwick.

Paul Wheelhouse, Scottish Government Minister for Business, Innovation and Energy says, “I am pleased to have the opportunity of supporting this ambitious project which seeks to harness the knowledge and expertise built up by the North Sea industry. This is a resource that is being created by industry, for industry. It will provide a comprehensive evidence base to ensure that efforts to tackle inefficiencies and change behaviours all draw on best practice experience for environmental and safety performance. This project has the opportunity to capture a wealth of knowledge, which will be of significant value to the industry going forward.”

The accumulated knowledge built up in the North Sea over the past 40 years has been trawled, re-assessed and distilled to build a global offshore resource which will be launched on August 3rd at Kings College, University of Aberdeen.

Tags: ICOE Research Limited