5 Days in the UK – Reveals the Strong Need for: Collaboration, Creativity and Competence

7 Insights For A Sustainable Oil And Gas Future – Learning From The UKCS

Change and challenges make us stronger and more equipped for the times ahead. Overcoming challenges provides us with the antidote to adversity and allows us to adapt and succeed in the long run. Alternatively, those who don’t take on challenges, simply don’t have the same set of tools needed to be resilient in the future.

In this light, times of change and challenge, like the price of oil dropping, are actually a good thing. And while short term reactions and media frenzies often paint a bleak picture, the long term higher vantage point always reveals that challenges like declining reserves in the UKCS, or the price of oil dropping, or hard to reach oil basins like that of the arctic, all provide fertile learning ground for what’s to come.

Oil has been the engine of the world’s economy for almost a century. The United Kingdom Continental Shelf (UKCS) alone has discovered and produced more that 43 billion barrels of oil equivalent, making it a senior oil play of global significance. The UKCS has a mature oil play and can teach us a lot about overcoming challenges and being creative in maximizing recovery of reserves for the future. Those working in the UKCS have done much work around what’s possible for the UKCS future, and this was never more evident than in the report, “UKCS Maximizing Recovery Review”, by Sir Ian Wood, who we had the pleasure of meeting.

What follows are seven key insights that we can adopt from the UKCS’s proactive approach to oil and gas progress. My five days in the UK provided a broad range of views and solutions, and there were some reoccurring themes that surfaced. I have summarized my findings into these seven insights which apply to not only the UKCS but also emerging markets like offshore Newfoundland, the lucrative Oil Sands, and new US Fracking plays. So in essence, these insights can apply to energy plays around the globe as a sustainable model for the times ahead:

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