On 11th of March an IET Control & Automation TPN organised evening seminar was given entitled ‘Automation in the oil and gas industry’ at the Broadway House conference venue in central London. 

 

The event consisted of two talks, each lasting 30 minutes with 15 minutes of Q&A at the end and a half hour networking coffee break in between. Therefore the over all event lasted a nominal two hours with a starting time of 18:00. Chris Bogath, the automation architect for Schlumberger Oilfield Ltd., gave the first talk, with its main content being the commercial and engineering drivers and constraints for down stream automation in oil and gas, which essentially means drilling and drilling related technologies. Dr. James Whidborne, a Reader in control and flight dynamics at Cranfeld University, gave the second talk which was technically biased with more detail about the specifics of recently made public control theory and its application to attitude and trajectory control of directional drilling tools. Both talks ran to time and there was no shortage of questions in the fifteen minutes at the end of each presentation. There was a good range of backgrounds and levels of expertise in the 69 delegates who registered as attending the event (over 120 people registered in advance – 100 attendees was the intended target) with students as well as experienced engineers from industry attending.  In fact the number that actually turned up suited the venue well. After the event one of the speakers was contacted by several people with enquires about the content of his presentation. 

 

Both speaker presentations were made available to the IET for public access. IET TV was also present at the event to both record the speakers presentations and to make short interviews with the speakers and attendees. A vote of thanks was given by the Chairman of the Manufacturing TPN exec team, Ronaldo Ronaldo at the end of the event. Overall the event was judged to have gone well with considerable interest and the format of two speakers for the evening with one focusing on the commercial and engineering aspects and the other on the theoretical content but both related to the same application seemed a good compromise between accessibility of material and academic content.

 

 

You can see the slides from James Whidborn's talk in our file section and interviews with both presenters below.