Employees in an oil field services company were recently asked if they considered themselves oil workers, technology workers or something else entirely.
"A digital oil field worker," one of them chimed in with a smile. Nods followed around the room.
Those following the oil and gas industry probably aren't surprised by this answer. In the last decade alone, the process has changed from mostly drilling wells directly downward, or vertically, to drilling mostly at different angles, called horizontal or directional wells.
A push for more efficiency in the oil patch has led to even more data collection and analysis of everything from the geology of drilling sites, to the operations of rigs and the engines powering them, to monitoring devices for leaks or other issues. Demands from investors and the public for more action on climate change has led to digital tools for tracking and reporting emissions.
This has meant oil and gas companies are recruiting more workers with advanced digital, technical and analytic skills. It also means technology companies are getting into the oil and gas business.
Take Nokia, the company best known for the boxy, push-button cellphone you or someone you know probably had about 20 years ago.
"Everybody's still asking me if I can fix a phone, if I can allow them to play Snake in their phones again," said Jaime Laguna, who now runs Nokia's oil and gas division, "but Nokia is a very, very old company, we have more than 100 years in the telecom business."
In the last few years, Laguna said, Nokia has diversified its business offerings, and bought the French telecom company Alcatel-Lucent in 2015. Alcatel-Lucent already was selling technology for seismic surveys of seabeds for offshore oil and gas drilling.
Laguna was with Alcatel-Lucent and joined Nokia in the acquisition. He said Nokia is expanding its offerings for every step of the oil and gas production, from wellhead to refinery.
"So if they need a private wireless infrastructure — which is right now, a big topic, a hot topic, a trending topic in the oil and gas business — we are offering the solution," Laguna said. "We are offering cybersecurity solutions as well. We are offering analytics. So it's a really end-to-end solution towards automation in the oil and gas market."
Laguna said oil and gas companies often operate in remote places but still need the Internet and other communication tools, especially as more digital devices are used in the oil field.
Nokia certainly isn't unique. Other tech companies are marketing artificial intelligence and machine learning tools to the oil and gas industry, including Amazon's Internet business AWS. In 2016, AWS helped oil major BP start migrating to a "cloud-first" approach, meaning data is stored on and accessed from the Internet.
Also, oil field services companies that traditionally supply labor and equipment to drilling sites are offering more digital tools. Houston-based Baker Hughes rebranded itself as an energy technology company in 2019, and companies like Schlumberger and Halliburton have technology divisions.
But Laguna said Nokia isn't competing with the oil field services industry — oftentimes the oil field services companies are customers of Nokia, buying technology that in turn makes their digital tools run at rig sites.
Still, tech companies moving into the oil and gas space has not been without controversy. After backlash from an environmental group's 2020 report on Big Tech selling tools to Big Oil, Google said it would no longer provide artificial intelligence to energy companies for locating and extracting fossil fuels.
That could act as a warning to other tech companies to steer clear of oil and gas over fears of negative public sentiment. That same sentiment could also hurt recruiting at oil and gas companies for workers with advanced digital skills, giving traditional tech companies an edge on talent.
It's clear that digital tools and technology have been so integrated into oil and gas operations that they're here to stay. And for their part, oil and gas companies stress that increasing technology is helping them meet climate change goals.
What's unclear is if that message will entice the right companies and employees to work with the oil and gas industry in the decades to come, or if they'll take the same route as Google.
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