Transcript
Speaker: Welcome back to Edison TV. We are continuing our deep dive into BP. This is the third in the series. ah Delighted to be joined today by Emeka Emembolu, Executive Vice President, Technology BP. To start off with, perhaps you can explain where technology sits within the BP organizational structure and the role technology plays within the company and indeed a little bit about yourself. I report directly to our CEO. um I represent the technology organization. In my team, we cover a range of different activities. We cover safety and security, including some intelligence. We cover research and development for the company. We cover digital, and we also cover procurement for the group. So kind of a range of activities, but i' would say what these things have in common and what our role is for BP is really to help give BP a competitive edge, to help make sure in the things we choose to do in our different businesses, we can do those using the best technology to get the best outcomes for our company. So that's that's kind of ah the focus. And I would say in line with the overall strategy of the company, yeah, this is what we're here to do. How do you assess BP's strategic progress mode so far this year? And how does technology enable and support specifically with respect to BP's stated priorities? In this phase of where we're going for BP, a big focus for everyone is just to look at a simpler BP, and a stronger BP, a more valuable BP. This is what we're trying to do as ah as a company. Our new CEO in our 2Q results laid out five key priorities. And I'll say technology has a really good role to play across the board. In terms of progress we're making against these different areas, out so on the capital side, we talked about this at 2Q, we're expecting our capital to come in for the full year and within the $13.5 to $14 billion dollars range. so again, continuing to tighten and make sure we're driving discipline into all of the investments that we're making.
Speaker: um We're also at the same time as coming in within that range, strengthening and simplifying our capital allocation processes. So these are conversations that we have with the leadership team around how we must continue to make sure we're making the right decisions and even re're using technology to help us support making those decisions, testing some of the investments that we're doing using AI to see how do these compare to things we have done in the past.
Speaker: Operational excellence, that's another area we mentioned. So our operating efficiency in our upstream facilities is in the range of about 95%, which again, we're continuing to look at how we improve every single percentage point in operating efficiencies, especially given today's macro environment, is extremely valuable to us as a company and technology is a big part of how we how we push on that. Availability in our refineries is also again key for us. so both on our operating efficiency and our refining availability. We're looking at those in the kind of 94-95% and continuing them to improve as we go through, through great people, great processes, best application of technology.
Speaker: And then our downstream businesses and our retail businesses where we service our customers either on the retail side or the aviation side. Again, really important part of our business. Finally, I'll say in terms of progress or making trading is a massive part BP's activity set and operation and another big place where people, processes, technology, player and assets, the right assets have a big impact.
Speaker: So you touched on that in your last answer, but AI. We hear a lot about AI as an enabler of performance. What do you think the evolution of ai is and how big an opportunity do you think this is?
Speaker: Massive opportunity for us at BP. So you hear about AI externally all the time. So it's just it's a constant topic of conversation. But we take this very seriously as AI as an opportunity to continue to build the competitive advantage that I talked about. Yeah. In terms of the way we do it, and it's probably worth me talking about how we approach it, and then we can talk about actually what we do with it as part of that approach. We have a pretty clear framework that we use to approach AI through. The first part of that framework is business focus.
Speaker: Everything that we do in technology, especially with AI, there needs to be a business purpose for it. We don't want to bring technology or partners in or kind of try and do things that are not addressing a business need or a business problem. And we can talk about what some of those business problems look like and and flesh that out a bit more. Second is around the foundations. And i would say in the foundations, I would put those in three broad buckets. So one is data. Data is a massive foundation that we need to have in place for AI. People say sometimes data is the fuel for AI. So this is this is one part of it, the partnerships. So really we have some really key partnerships. AWS and Microsoft are key to us in terms of cloud providers, and they help us with other capabilities.
Speaker: Databricks is the helps us with our unified data platform that we're building out across the group, as well as Palantir helping with the data insights for that platform. I mentioned NVIDIA, who we work with on the chip front, so to build out our HPC, which we use for both seismic and other forms of machine learning, AI, and compute. and We have emphasis in Accenture that we work really closely with in terms of as partners. SAP is another important one for us. And finally, Anthropic on the AI side is one of the fundamental foundational model providers. So these are that's kind of our core ecosystem that sits inside this foundational part of our of our pillar.
Speaker: Third pillar that we have is around trust. This is around how we make sure we can trust what we're getting out of AI. Actually, how we monitor the cost because we want to make sure everybody knows how much they're spending. you hear all the horror stories about people overspending on AI. We want to make sure that people can actually do what we have within BP with confidence. So trust is really important. Safety, regulatory requirements, and even cyber safety, how we use AI in that phase to make sure that we're running the company in the right way. And then finally, ah the last of the areas is around fluency. So how do we make sure we are training everybody in the company from the executive team all the way through the organization in terms of building that fluency with AI.
Speaker: So these are some of the key pillars for how we how we approach AI at BB. Okay. And um walk us through the sort of use cases and within the three different div or the different divisional Yeah. I start in the upstream. And again, I start in the upstream. And when you go to the upstream, you always have to start with the rocks. So subsurface is where it all begins.
Speaker: Key starting point is geophysics, high performance computing. And what we we have done there is we've actually significantly increased the capacity of our high performance computing system that we have based in Houston. What that has unlocked for us is the ability to be able to process seismic both faster than we ever had before, but also to solve problems we never were able to before when we had the reduced capacity.
Speaker: And the outcome of being able to do these things kind of comes into our explorationists and our subsurface teams having these tools that they can use to drive the exploration success that we've seen. So this has supported some of what we have done in Brazil and in Namibia so it tastes and in the Gulf of America. So these are some of the things that we've been able to do with technology supporting our geoscientists. um Kind of moving on from there, ResWare simulation is another area where we're investing. We have selected a new simulation system that we're using as a company. AI is front and center to that new simulation system, as is the compute that we have. AI in our high-performance computing center.
Speaker: When I go to the kind of into the production side, production optimization, this has been bread and butter for us for a number of years. So the Palantir Foundry system has been critical and key to some of the percentage improvements that we've made in operating efficiency across a number of years. And actually, it's helped us generate and kind of significant additional value for our company in terms of free cash and obviously to shareholders directly from what we've done in simulation.
Speaker: If I move to the downstream, there's probably two areas worth touching on. Refining. Over the years, we have not invested as much in our refining digital system as we should have done. But last year, we made a course correction, and we're investing more in that system. We're moving from much older ways of operating to a more digitally enabled system. way of of running that business. Brenda Stout, who's our Senior Vice President for Refining, is a massive advocate for what we can do with digital systems and has been a huge driving force behind helping make sure we're getting the right outcomes. We've recently just implemented a new system in our Castillon refinery. We're going to be expanding to the rest of the refineries, which helps the operators on the front line on a day-to-day basis be able to manage their activities and be safer and connects and integrates a whole number of
Speaker: previously non-integrated systems like we haven't had before. So that's refining. In the our retail business, um something i' would say our retail team are particularly proud of is our Earnify platform that we operate in the United States. So this is the loyalty system that we've got. And for listeners who might be tapping in the United States, you'd actually see it's kind of one of the top 10 Apps and Navigation is our BPR and FI platform. So it's the platform that we use to make sure people are informed about our loyalty offer. But it actually, behind the scenes, we have a lot of technology, including AI we use to build it. And AI is very evidently powering it to help make sure our customers can get the best deal. So that's, again, another area that we've that we are really stepping into. And we're looking to unify or to more harmonize our technology offer for our retail business. So this has been a big deal.
Speaker: If I move to trading, um again, another area where it's this is trading is a really important part of our company. and Trading is one of them it's one of the points at which integrates both the upstream and downstream to maximize value and give additional returns for our company and we're doing a significant investment in our trading technology stack in order to get it to a different place.
Speaker: what An example of what we're doing in trading and you know just prior to coming into this meeting, I met with one of our traders who shared with us how he's been integrating a number of different data sources and we're building AI advisors for a number of our traders. We've rolled it out in parts of trading and is going to be expanding over the next two years to the rest of trading, just to provide them the type of access they've never been able to have before to all of our data that sits in trading and link data from beyond the company into that trading system using AI to be able to help traders make better trades, faster trades, to be more competitive. in the market. So, um yeah, we're really excited about a lot of what we're doing in the technology space. I would say all underpinned by a data platform that we're building with Databricks. We call our unified data platform.
Speaker: Do you have any sort of robotics or a combination of AI and robotics programs within BP? And how are you seeing that? yeah Thanks for asking, because this is an area that I feel really excited and really confident about, the we're of things that we're doing in the company. Robotics is one of our key strategic themes in our upstream technology roadmap.
Speaker: Across the company, we have used robots in one form or another, either drones or crawlers. We use them regularly in a number of our assets, but we haven't really developed put together an integrated platform that that looks at end-to-end how these robots interact with the physical world and how that data flows into our systems in a fully effective way.
Speaker: So in order to build this ecosystem out, what we're doing is we're actually concentrating on one of our terminals in Sengachau in Azerbaijan, and we're building out our full robotic system. We're using it as basically a flagship yeah location to build out our fully integrated system.
Speaker: The intent then is for us to expand from there and actually roll out this new platform across the rest of the group over the next few years, but starting again with Sangachal. And the team out there have been amazing, actually. They've been amazing in terms of pulling on the technology and adopting the technology and testing it and just seeing what the limits are and seeing what's possible. A great example of something outsourced in Azerbaijan back in July. And one of the the drones that we demoed was something which we could actually use to repair spot defects in some of our pipelines or some of our tanks.
Speaker: What this unlocks for us is the ability for people to go around the site or even for machines to go around the site. identify a defect and then the local team can easily leverage these technologies, these drones to do repairs. So it's moving from just observation to actually tasks being undertaken and in time we hope to get to the point where those tasks can be done autonomously. So where we can actually dispatch drones to do fixes and repairs in our sites. So I think the future for robotics in the oil and gas industry is extremely bright and really exciting.
Speaker: Abigail, thank you so much. you know As I got to know the BP story, you know there's things within it that really stand out, the exploration success, the efficiency numbers that are from on the production side. And there's always been this clue that technology been an enabler. I think you've got a brilliant an overview of how technology is working at atd BP. Thank you very much. My pleasure. Thank you.
