TPT January 2019

G LOBA L MARKE T P L AC E

Things (IIoT) architecture EcoStruxure for delivery of smart machine solutions. (“Oil And Gas Industry Gradually Getting Comfortable With Storing Data Off-Premise,” 16 November) › Despite the broadening acceptance by the oil and gas sector of off-site data storage, Ms Marcotte said that cybersecurity worries remain a top barrier to its outright adoption of IIoT. Acknowledging that there is no such thing as zero risk, she appealed for the “beefing up” of security at every link of the people-processes-technology energy chain. “Technology is doing its bit, but personnel need to play their part,” she told Mr Sharma. “There is no such thing as ‘minimum compliance’. There is either compliance or non-compliance.” The American ‘shale revolution’ continues to propel the US to the forefront of the world’s oil and gas producers In its annual “World Energy Outlook”, published on 12 November, the International Energy Agency (IEA) projected that the USA will account for nearly 75 per cent and 40 per cent of global oil and gas growth, respectively, over the next six years. The USA is seen as accounting for roughly half of global crude and natural growth by 2025. “The shale revolution continues to shake up oil and gas supply, enabling the US to pull away from the rest of the field as the world’s largest oil and gas producer,” said the Paris-based organisation that advises governments and corporations on energy trends. “By 2025, nearly every fifth barrel of oil and every fourth cubic metre of gas in the world [will] come from the United States.” The American production is expected to be driven primarily by shale fracking – the use of hydraulic fracturing to drill for oil in shale rock. This should lead US shale oil supply to more than double, reaching 9.2 million barrels per day (bpd) by the mid- 2020s, the agency said. A reshaped global industry Christopher Alessi, a London-based reporter for the Wall Street Journal , covering energy, noted the extent to which fracking has “dramatically” reshaped the global oil industry over the past decade, allowing the USA to rival the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) for market share. Writing from Abu Dhabi, Mr Alessi recalled that shale was largely behind the glut of American oil that flooded the market some four years ago, leading oil prices to fall to $30 a barrel from more than a $100 a barrel in late 2014. (“US Expected to Produce Half of Global Oil and Gas Growth by 2025,” 12 November)

tubular steel products and 19 per cent of all steel line pipe required by domestic energy producers to support the growth of US energy production.” › In the view of this Texas oilman, nowhere in America is this steel more crucial than in the energy-rich Permian Basin in Texas, which is already struggling under the weight of 25 per cent higher steel costs resulting from the tariffs. He noted that, while tariffs have a detrimental impact by increasing project costs, the approach at least ensures that firms can still buy the steel needed to drill new projects. Quotas, in contrast, he wrote, “put up a brick wall that absolutely cuts off the supply of products critical to getting oil and gas from the ground in the Permian Basin.” Despite lingering concerns about security, the energy industry has been embracing cloud and off-premises data storage Schneider Electric SE is a French multinational that specialises in energy management solutions that combine energy, automation and software. According to Nathalie Marcotte, the company’s senior vice president for industry services and cybersecurity, acceptance of the need for and benefits of storing large volumes of data off-site rather than on-premises has risen exponentially in the oil and gas sector over the last five years. Ms Marcotte says she has perceived a gradual easing of the anxieties over cybersecurity that turned off industry players from allowing their data to be stored off-site. She attributes this to the rapid spread of cloud computing and a more general acceptance of digitisation in the sector. “Even as recently as five years ago, if you pitched cloud-based or off-premise solutions to some in the energy industry, they would not engage with you,” Ms Marcotte told Gaurav Sharma, a UK-based oil and gas analyst and Forbes contributor. “Now I see all that changing.” The occasion was the “Innovation Summit”, a global management and automation event hosted by Schneider Electric, 13-14 November in Atlanta, USA. Mr Sharma took note of what he termed the company’s “perspective”. He wrote, “[It] wants energy sector players to embrace cloud and remote connectivity in ever greater volumes, as it pours billions into digital solutions and cybersecurity research and development.” But he also pointed out that – efficiency and process optimisation having become “quite the buzzwords since the oil price slump of 2014” – the energy sphere is “ripe” for Schneider’s aggressive marketing of its Industrial Internet of

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JANUARY 2019