OREANDA-NEWS. November 15, 2013. The Middle East is home to the largest digital oil and gas fields in the world, and so Dubai proved to be a fitting location for the Society of Petroleum Engineers Intelligent Energy Conference.

Sponsored by Saudi Aramco, the three-day event attracted more than 18,000 participants and visitors and allowed company engineers and scientists to showcase Saudi Aramco’s ground-breaking upstream technology.

The conference is the world’s premier knowledge- and experience-sharing forum for intelligent energy development and implementation across the exploration and production value chain.

Under the theme “Realizing the Full Asset Value,” the conference was opened by conference executive chairman and Saudi Aramco chief petroleum engineer Ali Alghamdi, along with the deputy head of the Supreme Council for Energy in Dubai, Saeed Mohammed Al Tayer, managing director and CEO of Dubai Electricity and Water Authority.

“We envision this event to provide a rich platform for unlocking the potential of the digital field and paving the way toward greater value creation,” said Alghamdi in his opening remarks. “This comes at a time when the industry is facing new unique challenges, including challenging plays, expanding geographic locations, and increasing demand for energy. In turn, our industry, through innovation and technology, has been able to tap into resources that were not reachable in the past. Such technologies include extended and multi-lateral drilling, geosteering, remote control and monitoring, and integrated collaborative environments.”

Alghamdi told the audience that intelligent energy was helping the industry overcome the scarcity of skilled manpower resources. “Through the use of automated processes, collaboration centers, and digital field implementation, engineers are able to spend more time to gain insight and make effective decisions, while spending less time trying to gather and manage data. Young engineers now have access to the expertise of seasoned professionals who might be in different locations, or even different companies, through real-time collaborative environments,” he said.

During the conference more than 100 technical presentations were delivered by a wide range of distinguished speakers representing more than 50 companies.

Hussein Al-Qahtani, manager of Process and Control Systems at Saudi Aramco, told attendees that the company has been able to expand from not only an oil and gas company but to one that operates in the wider energy sector, including chemicals and electric power.

He also added that one of the most important elements of research for the company was smart engineering — a more sophisticated and intelligent approach to data analysis to help exploration and recovery efforts.

Saudi Aramco has already taken steps in this direction with its new Engineering Solutions Center, which provides a collaborative integrated information environment for multi-disciplinary engineering teams to work together more effectively than ever before. The center has launched a new era of integrated solutions, allowing immediate data flow from operating facilities to engineers and scientists using the latest imaging techniques.

Evidence of Saudi Aramco’s leadership in intelligent field technology can be seen in the more than 15 working papers authored and presented by experts from various organizations