Data-Driven Passion for Energy

June 15th 2022 – 4Subsea was interviewed by Microsoft on the topic “Data-Driven Passion for Energy”. IoT technology that improves decision-making for oil & gas and renewables has enormous global potential and helps create an appealing workplace.


4Subsea has a rich history in the energy space and is owned by the industry-giant Subsea 7 group. Close to 125 staff work from the company’s HQ just outside of Oslo and from offices in the Norwegian cities Bergen, Kristiansand and Stavanger, as well as Rio de Janeiro and Aberdeen.

 

There are few other workplaces with more passion for geeky technology.

– Peter Jenkins, CEO of 4Subsea.

 

The company combines domain expertise in the energy sector with cutting-edge technology that helps decision-makers with insight that maximizes lifetime of assets, reduces operation costs, brings home HSE-benefits, and optimize future projects and designs.

 

We help our customers create new insight, new ways of working and new business models with technology. We extract data from offshore installations, vessels, and wind farms that we contextualise, and our advanced algorithms interpret and create valuable insight from the data. Then, we make both the raw and interpreted data available to operational decision-makers, engineers, and data scientists. This allows our clients to make better operational decisions, enabling them to learn and develop based on the new insight we have created.

– Peter Jenkins, CEO of 4Subsea.

 

From left: Peter Jenkins, CEO of 4Subsea & Daniel Reime, Partner Development Manager Lead at Microsoft.

 

End-to-end for insight and analysis

4Subsea assist its customers in determining what data is needed, the integration of sensors, tailor-made algorithms, and data platforms for distribution of valuable insight and data for further analytics.

The solutions are engineered by a multidisciplinary team of data scientists, software developers, those that are experts in sensors, engineers, and subject matter experts with domain expertise.

 

We develop solutions together with our customers. Our favourite part is putting together experts from across the value chain to identify new areas that we can improve.

– Peter Jenkins, CEO of 4Subsea.

 

The company works with the major players in oil and gas and is also venturing toward other maritime segments and wind farms.

 

Big data for wind and water

Jenkins shares some examples of the type of value they provide to their customers:

 

  • Improving the operability of a rig or a ship, for instance, by reducing the number of days spent waiting on favourable weather conditions to perform an operation
  • Avoiding stops in production and operations using advanced algorithms enabling clients to “know it before it happens” and to use data and guidance from domain experts to manage unplanned events safely
  • Using data gathered from existing assets to optimise new designs, reducing CAPEX for future assets

 

Our ambition is to be the leading, global data platform for engineers and data scientists to create and distribute data-driven decision support in the energy industry. Therefore, our solutions are fun to use. They are designed to be self-serviced for engineers and data scientists so that they don’t need help from software developers to work with data.

For certain drilling operations, our services have a market share of around 75%. Our algorithms have seen data from approximately 400 wells drilled by a variety of rigs and operators in many regions. For about 30% of these wells, we detect anomalies. Our findings provide clients with critical decision support that reduces risk and cost of operation.

– Peter Jenkins, CEO of 4Subsea.

 

Technology for critical purposes

4Susbea has been working on engineering of floating wind turbines since 2009. Today the company is transferring its digital technology from monitoring drilling operations to structural health monitoring of wind farms. For wind farms, the same type of IoT sensors and algorithms that are used in drilling can be used to optimise the operational life of a wind farm.

 

With growing concern about the cost of operating wind farms, we see that the value for operators to document the structural integrity of their farms becomes important both for the valuation of the asset in a transaction and to keep insurance costs down.

The data is also used for research and development and when planning new farms. Insight removes the risk of bad decisions and making wrong assumptions.

– Peter Jenkins, CEO of 4Subsea.

 

For shipowners, insight from sensors is a necessary step towards better operations and a future of more autonomous operations.

 

We enable shipowners to improve the operability of their fleet performing marine construction activities in oil and gas or offshore wind. The algorithms optimise the operating window for vessels carrying out marine operations. It also helps raise the crew’s awareness of fuel consumption, which is a critical first step toward decreasing the environmental footprint of marine operations.  Marine operations are still executed in a fairly traditional manner, and we see great potential for delivering value to the shipowner while at the same time contributing to a reduced environmental footprint.

– Peter Jenkins, CEO of 4Subsea.

 

Partnering for global growth

4Subsea relies on the partnership with Microsoft and is amongst the companies in Norway that send the most data into the cloud.

 

The 4insight platform resides on Microsoft Azure, where the customers can perform their own analysis and share data. Being in Azure is great for us in terms of scalability and maintaining industry-leading security levels.

– Peter Jenkins, CEO of 4Subsea.

 

From left: Elena Bolla, Ina Ellingsen, Vibeke Nordlie & Peter Jenkins.
From left: Elena Bolla (Microsoft), Ina Ellingsen (4Subsea), Vibeke Nordlie (Microsoft) & Peter Jenkins (4Subsea).

 

Microsoft is thrilled with the partnership and Vibeke Nordlie, Microsoft’s partner contact for 4Subsea believes that 4Subsea is a global front-runner in its industry. She is very enthusiastic about helping this Norwegian success venture into new markets.

 

It is very important for us to have highly-skilled partners who develop such specialised, high-value solutions for specific industry needs. It is inspiring to see the value that 4Subsea brings to the market, and we want to make them more visible to our global energy & utility team so that they can scale globally.

– Vibeke Nordlie, Partner Development Manager, Microsoft.

 

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