HOUSTON—Plagued by a slow-moving pace when it comes to the adoption of technology, the oil and gas industry’s apprehension has led to a race to second place. But, startups are developing valuable technology today that is fast tracking the digital transformation across the industry.

Today, the value of digital technology is being realized well before the adoption stage. During a panel discussion at Rice Alliance’s annual Energy and Clean Technology Venture Forum at Rice University on Sept. 11, a panel of technology executives detailed the challenges and opportunities of the digital transformation and technologies they’ve adopted to secure leading spots in the race.

“We are at a unique point in our industry where digital emerging technologies have the capacity to completely transform the way that we’ve been doing things for decades,” Nadia Bollinger, digital exploration manager at Exxon Mobil Corp., said. “To that end, I’m sure that there are mixed emotions when we try to make sense of concepts like AI, IoT, and digital twin. On one hand, looking at these digital emerging technologies can be really exciting, but on the other hand, it can feel very stressful.”

Working in favor of the wave, Bollinger said Exxon Mobil is firmly committed to the digital transformation and “to opportunities and collaboration to both identify and scale solutions.”

Exxon Mobil saw the opportunity to start with its operations in the Permian Basin. Described as ‘windshield time’ at Exxon, Bollinger found that the company’s field technicians spend a sizable amount of time in their trucks, gathering data on well performance that has to be jotted down because reception is spotty in the basin, and then returning to the field office to record the information into the proper system in order to be analyzed.

“We looked at the Permian and thought there has to be a better way to do this. So, naturally [we thought] IoT sensors at the well sites like Edge Gateway devices to aggregate some of that data and maybe do some analyses, then send that information up to the cloud—that all kind of made sense,” she said.

In partnership with Microsoft, the team developed an open framework that leveraged IoT, Edge Gateway and cloud storage to collect, process and analyze “the massive amounts of data that’s being generated by the minute” by all of Exxon Mobil’s different field aspects to enable real-time access to the data from anywhere at any time on the field, according to Bollinger.

Exxon Mobil also translated its innovative efforts to additional parts of its business.

“In the manufacturing space, we have deployed a manufacturing data lake that collects operational data from our process control systems into a high-performance computing environment for the first time,” she added. “We’re now able to marry data that comes in different frequencies into a single place, so people can view that data and make new insights.”

Tim Kopra, partner at Blue Bear Capital LLC, a venture fund that focuses on data-driven technology companies within the energy supply chain, detailed how his company seeks out startups to back.

“We love it when we find a company that’s going to really target a very specific problem,” Kopra said. “Find that problem that really needs to get solved and really hone that. Make sure you have the right solution and total addressable market because as a venture person we want to be able to help you scale.”

Among the products that have caught the eye of Blue Bear is Everactive’s batteryless sensor technology. The Eversensors utilizes energy harvested from the surrounding environment to create a data foundation of full-stack industrial IoT solutions. It senses and transmits data onto the company’s Evercloud system to provide actionable insights.

“It’s a really amazing company that’s caught traction,” Kopra said.

Blue Blear’s portfolio also includes investment into GoExpedi, an e-commerce platform focused on industrial supply. Kopra described it as the “Amazon of the oil field.”

“Being an oil and gas person, I was shocked that you couldn’t just buy equipment and know what the price was and get it delivered. It seems like in this day and age it would be the normal thing to do,” he said.

The process typically involves finding out the price for the desired product, placing a bid it and then waiting a couple of weeks for delivery, he said. GoExpedi has created a way to streamline the process.

“GoExpedi puts 200,000 SKUs on their website and all the pricing is there—it’s transparent—and they crush it with rock-solid execution delivering in 48 hours. So, the ability for them to expand is really amazing,” Kopra said.

Jose Silva, emerging technologies and strategies manager at Occidental Petroleum Corp., has used his background as a geophysicist to stay on the innovative path. The company is currently building machine learning architecture that replicates the work of a geophysicist, but in a tenth of the time, Silva said.

With Big Oil and companies like Exxon Mobil, Blue Bear and Occidental unveiling the value of going digital, the opportunity is apparent. But, the panelists agreed that without leadership and a switch in mindsets, the digital direction for non-participants will continue to be foggy.

“What’s interesting to us is that some of the large oil and gas companies are very interested in transforming their processes and some are not, at all, or they don’t really have the mindset,” Kopra said.

“Digital transformation sounds like it’s all technical, but at the end of the day the way that it succeeds is by intersecting people and solving those problems,” he added. “It’s a people business and to the extent that we expand that network and we have better introductions, the better we’ll be able to do.”