BP's Head of Technology Harnesses Petaflops to Drive Headline Efficiencies

Most would assume that technology jargon and computing prowess need not be part of conversations with senior oil and gas executives, and the sector is often chided for being behind the digital curve.

However, in an age where bits and bytes are everywhere, at a time when oil and gas majors crave process efficiencies, such clichés are destined for the dustpan, according to David Eyton, Group Head of Technology at BP.

Despite trying times for the industry, Eyton says the oil and gas major invested two-thirds of a billion dollars towards digitally driven research and development (R&D) last year, and a similar amount deploying fruits of the labor that led to its recent “digital oilfield” modelling concept.

In pursuit of the optimal solution, BP has notched up a series of firsts for the oil and gas business – from 4D seismic site surveys to state of the art ocean floor detection nodes, drones tracking installations to hubs processing high density real-time data that is pouring in from installations.

David Eyton, Group Head of Technology at BP, addresses a team meeting. Photo by Graham Trott © BP

Eyton’s face lights up when he mentions “Advanced Collaborative Environments”, BP’s monitoring centers based onshore that enable experts to work directly with offshore operators using real-time information.

One such center in the Energy Corridor district of Houston, Texas is capable of data processing speeds of up to four petaflops. “That’s four quadrillion floating point operations per second (FLOPS) requiring a massive number of computers working in parallel on the same task with an aim of processing it in the quickest possible time.”

To provide some context, US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Laboratory Titan supercomputer has a speed of 20 petaflops. So why does BP need four petaflops? “Digital is everywhere within the company. Back office and administrative IT department, of course, is completely separate from the process technology unit.

“Members of my unit are not all are IT hacks – we have geologists, surveyors, engineers, petrochemists and support staff, all contributing towards developing digital processes. For instance, BP’s patented Independent Simultaneous Sources (ISS) technology for land seismic imaging was designed by our geophysicists in tandem with the programmers.”

And Eyton, most certainly, isn’t an IT hack himself in a true sense of the word. Having qualified as a civil engineer, he went on to hold several executive offices in the upstream division of BP from Trinidad to Australia over the last three decades, before taking on his current role seven years ago.