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Cambridge Ph.D. graduate Rob Perrons recently began work as a Smart Fields Consultant for Shell Internationall, his employer since early 1997. He has traveled along an interesting path to get there. This is his story: “My area of expertise in the oil industry is called Production Engineering, which basically entails getting the stuff from the reservoir to the surface and then making sure that it gets distributed to some kind of useful end via a boat or pipeline. My first posting with Shell in 1997 happened to be in the UK, and pretty much all of the UK’s non-trivial oil & gas reserves are offshore. Thus, what might sound like an exotic adventure to some is actually pretty standard fare in the North Sea. Thousands of guys suit up and fly off to those platforms every week. Talking about the industry all day from an ivory tower in London doesn’t teach you about what’s really going on out there. You really have to get the dirt under your fingernails for a while to understand that end of the business.”

In 2001, Rob was awarded a Gates Cambridge Scholarship to study at Cambridge University. “My PhD focused on technology management and, when I was investigating the possibility of returning to Shell upon graduating, this new experience opened up a neat opportunity for me. A fascinating job popped up: ‘Executive Coordinator of R&D’. In a nutshell, this job entailed keeping things ticking over within and among the executive-level people in Shell’s upstream R&D program. If a foreign government official was coming to visit Shell to see what we were capable of with regards to technological savvy, I would organize the speech/presentation. I wasn’t an executive; rather, I was the guy behind the scenes who made sure that the executives’ jobs looked easy. When a decision was required from the team, I would coalesce all the relevant facts into bite-size options that the management team could choose from.” This ultimately led to his current position working with Smart Fields.

“‘Smart Fields’ is essentially Shell’s attempt to drag the oil patch into the information age. The oil & gas industry has historically pivoted on people making extremely imperfect guesses with extremely imperfect data (a predictable consequence of trying to engineer something a few miles below the earth’s surface via a hole a few inches wide). By adding an appropriate amount and kind of sensors, and then putting the resulting data into the right hands, we’re trying to do a better job of real-time optimization than has been the case in the past. Example: natural gas sits on top of the oil within a hydrocarbon reservoir. As the reservoir is depleted, the oil and gas contact line—that is, the interface between the two phases—shifts around. But how? Knowing precisely how the reservoir is changing would allow us to manage it much more intelligently, thereby making it possible to optimize the overall recovery. In years gone by, a reservoir engineer would make an educated guess and then live with it for decades. Many years after the original assumption, it might be revealed that he/she grossly misunderstood the situation—but by then it’s too late. Smart Fields, by stark contrast, involves putting sensors at strategic points throughout the reservoir so that we can “see” in real-time what’s going on down there. And once we have this information, we then make sure that the right people are receiving it so that they can stay on top of the situation and modify how they’re managing the field. This basic concept of capturing the most salient bits of data and then using them for continuous optimization is at the heart of Smart Fields, and it can be applied in everything we do.”

“The whole industry is now galloping in this direction, and I knew two years ago that I could carve out a fascinating niche for myself if I got in on the ground level of this. I’ve done some writing about this stuff, incidentally. I’ve discovered that, for all its money, this industry doesn’t see patterns in how technologies evolve. I’m trying to help it see these situations a little more clearly—and I seem to be earning a surprising amount of “street cred” by doing so.” Rob also wanted to impart some advice to prospective applicants to Shell: “Good news: you can help to deliver energy to a world that is desperately screaming for more of the stuff, and you can make sure that it’s delivered in as environmentally friendly and socially responsible a way as possible. Bad news: brace yourself for one helluva wait, as nothing happens quickly in this business.” For more on Rob’s work, check out his homepage.