July-October issue

September 2025

OFFSHORE EUROPE EVENT REPORT

• North Sea petroleum politics and industry - The UK North Sea energy industry is not happy to have become a pawn in a political battle between the governing Labour, opposition Conservative, and populist Reform Parties
• The future of the North Sea - How it would best maintain its skills base and how UK policy needs to change, with speakers from Equinor, Shell, Wood, Scottish Renewables and members of parliament from opposite parties
• The vision for the North Sea - Stuart Payne, chief executive of the UK’s North Sea regulator, and Bob Keiller, former CEO of Wood Group, shared ideas on the future of the UK North Sea energy industry
• Maintaining the UK North Sea supply chain - UK would like to maintain or build its base of UK suppliers during the energy transition. A panel with Great British Energy, Subsea7 and Ithaca debated
• Re-purposing the UK regulator’s data - North Sea Transition Authority is keen to support people to re-purpose some of the data it has gathered from oil and gas operations, to use for CO2 storage, hydrogen storage and geothermal projects

• Energy industry confidence in transition is declining - a DNV survey found for its 2025 Energy Insight Report. Political risk is a growing barrier
• Using GenAI to do more for asset performance management in control systems - such as by telling you the wider implication of any problem. But you need integrated data sources to do it. ABB explains
• Using AI to better manage tanker loading - Diamond Key International (DKI) of Australia helped tanker terminals to run their operations more efficiently, they explained at a PIDX webinar
• LLMs and supply chain data - LLMs can convert unstructured supply chain data into structured data. The richer structured data can then be used, together with language models, to drive decisions. Wonderbotz explained in a PIDX webinar
• Groundup.ai templates to build equipment health models faster - templates of commonly used rotating equipment, which can be used to build equipment health models faster, to identify trends leading to failure modes
• How Emerson uses local AI models in managing industrial processes - including designing plant, planning control system upgrades, developing decarbonisation strategy
• Managing cybersecurity on offshore unoccupied assets - extremely difficult, particularly if you are legally required to allow people to board them when in distress. The answer is a system with multiple layers. ABB experts explained
• Using 5G in energy operations - they also offer benefits over wi-fi for a private network such as for an offshore oil and gas installation. Ericsson explained
• How ABB manages internal training - under the name “ABB University,” it covers technical developments and soft skills, and includes e-learning, webinars and classroom training
• Making a subsea digital twin from camera images together with image processing - It is possible to develop sophisticated “digital twin” 3D images of subsea equipment. This can help plan operations and understand problems. HPR explained
• Automated tools to manage machine identity - many companies do not know exactly what devices they have on their network. This makes cybersecurity much harder. Device Authority has automated tools to map them
• Improving OSV performance with an “efficiency loop” - Opsealog has a process to help operators of Offshore Supply Vessels (OSV) improve fuel consumption / emissions and utilisation