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NEWS & INSIGHTS | Opinion

We’re celebrating our 3rd Anniversary!

10 February 2020
Written by Colette Cohen OBE

I would like to thank the OGTC team and everyone who has worked with us over the last 3 years and helped us co-invest more than £140 million in over 200 technologies, commercialise more than 20, set up over 22 new companies, create more than 90 jobs and work hard to inspire a new generation of engineers!

3 years have gone in a flash. And so much has changed. When we opened our doors in February 2017 we were a fledging organisation with 10 staff and a big aspiration – to develop and deploy technology to positively impact the delivery of the oil and gas industry in the north sea and its supporting supply chain. We also want to create a culture of innovation in the region.

Working closely with industry, the Scottish and UK governments, ONE, OGA, OGUK, TLB, academia, councils and many others, we had already started to identify key pain points where we could focus our initial technology investments. And of course…everyone wanted things faster, cheaper and safer.

We had £180 million over 10 years to co-invest, which is a great start, but we knew it would require clear focus to make a real and lasting difference. The OGTC Technology vision and our Technology Roadmaps were developed to create that focus.

And we’re already delivering against those goals, creating technology that changes how we inspect offshore, reducing the requirement to enter confined spaces, developing next generation drones to interact with our facilities, new predictive analytics to allow us to change how we operate, changing how we plug and abandon wells, find missed pay in reservoirs, drill subsea wells, deliver power to wellheads…the list goes on. We have invested in more than 200 new technologies and already commercialised 20 of them. Its been an exciting ride.

But the world is rapidly changing. We are all being asked what are we doing to help the UK deliver a Net Zero Carbon environment ? And specifically, in carbon intensive industries like ours, what are we doing?

In 2019, as the offshore oil and gas industry launched Roadmap 2035 – a blueprint for net zero, the OGTC launched our Net Zero Solution Centre. We are committed to developing technologies to unlock the full potential of the North Sea, partnering with the renewables sector to deliver net zero hydrocarbons, blue hydrogen and cost-effective carbon sequestration.

These are challenging times. But the industry thrives on a challenge. We have overcome harsh environments and huge technical obstacles to deliver hydrocarbon to the world. With investment, commitment and a willingness to collaborate, we can help to set the benchmark for an industrial transition here in the UK, which can be replicated around the world. Our 4th year is a pivotal year for the industry – it’s time to change.

Hello Future…

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