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Last breath of Trondhjem summer.
Posted in summer, tagged Trondheim on August 19, 2017| Leave a Comment »
Posted in Paparazzi Ethnography, tagged Subsea Factory, Trondheim on September 28, 2014| Leave a Comment »
9/30: Arriving early to get a lay of the land catching a glimpse of workers taking a breath before the launch while exploring spaces first-hand without admonition associated with overstepping boundaries during ritualized activity.
Center for Integrated Operation Conference, September 30- October 1
The event begins with a few introductory comments from Arild Nystad, Chair IO Center/NTNU and a short video depicting graphic design innovations in knowledge communication in the oil and gas industry.
Up now is Unni Steinsmo, President of SINTEF, largest research concern in Norway, talking about technology, generic developments that have daily impacts on oil/gas development and society more generally. Unni points out the diversity of the IO Center as measured by the various academic and industry partners involved, including the number of partners, publications, MA and PhD degrees. Sustainability framed in terms of carbon capture and sequestration but also in terms of IO capacity for introduction organizational and technical innovations.
Plenary I: Intelligent Petroleum Fields and future technology challenges in Oil and Gas
Session chairs: Frans van den Berg, Shell and Arild Nystad, IO Center
Tord Lien, Norwegian Minister of Petroleum and Energy. Introduced as having taken an MA degree in history at NTNU, 2003.
He begins, “I’m happy that you mentioned my MA degree at NTNU even though it isn’t in energy [audience chuckles]”. The future of the Norwegian continental shelf.
Opening of Ekofisk [petroleum well] in 1969, a dramatic event. Today, nevertheless, projects today on hold, rising development costs and declines in production taking place raise concern.
General tendency is that Barents sea will be developed. Goliath [production] opening up next year, licensing rounds increasing, maturity in Nowegian continental shelf being revisited through enhanced production and new licensing.
The Subsea Factory: Solving complex technical challenges. Industry must be initiator of handling developments in industrial sector and government needs to take a back seat or provide funding. Government’s role is to create frameworks of innovation through public funding support, as an example, RCN’s Petromaks and Petrosams research and development.
Helge Lund, CEO, Statoil, speaking now on technology enablers for increased efficiency. “Thank you for the opportunity to address this expert audience [Last week in Trondheim addressing 500 students on how to address challenges of development] – contributing with some reflections on oil and gas environment. Last few months have illustrated how volatile the world is these days, instability in Middle East (Iraq, Syria), Russia and Ukraine, Africa (Nigeria), almost got a new country in Europe (Scotland) which would impact oil and gas companies.”
Three issues that industry needs to deal with communities, climate and competitiveness. Community: Industry needs access to reservoirs, but also dealing with new areas closer to communities, and there are higher expectations than not creating harm, but also to share the benefits of development which is much more than royalty and tax share. Tanzania, last month during a gas discovery, you could grasp the sense of expectation.
Climate: Last week at the UN attending climate meeting, an urgent fight, and could feel the personal pressure to be a part of the solution as a representative of the industry. We need to provide these resources with less CO2 emissions, requiring new policies to stimulate innovation and new innovation, and society should put forth a sufficiently high price on CO2 in order to address the issue. Carbon intensity is an integrated part of how Statoil addresses moving forward, integrating what those figures might be in decision making. [US Dakotas] Bakken off-gassing, has been converted to CNG dramatically reducing flaring and halted field composition on gas; Peregrino, looking for transport solutions and reducing energy consumption.
Competition: build in more production, reduce complexity through innovation (industrial standardization across operators and suppliers, fast-track projects, lower costs) – providing huge potentials through simplifications — achieving plug-in play rationality. Integrated operation “as I see it” is an enabler. A broad set of centralized centers, saving cost and improving possibility of efficient operations and decision making. Technology can make companies, make industries and transform societies. No doubt, technologies will continue to change oil/gas development in the same way geopolitical conditions influence the context.
[Questions by participants] Expectations of a CO2 price of $50-$75 per ton. By 2020, reconfiguring $50 per ton (which is low), in order to keep licenses to operate and continue to move gas to replace coal.
Cristina Pinho, E&P Executive manager, Petrobras commenting on upstream services and its enormous scale. The most challenging aspects of development is the human capital issues, but the most rewarding also is the team implementation.
Chon Fui Chai, General Manger Smart Fields, Shell, sharing a journey to smart fields, stressing Organizational capability through structure, behavior, sustainability; Dealing with big data, collecting and using the right data, algorithms that convert sensing to sense making utilizing industry standards and predictive analytics; Consistent screening and technology deployment in projects through project screening and follow up…
General discussion with the speakers at the panel stage: investment costs up by 75-80 percent, with development profits up only by 4-5 percent. What is going on with this, asks Arild Nystad. Responses: Differentiating where we need standardization and industrialization versus innovation and creativity.
Lunch
Plenary II: Proactive Operations
Session chairs: Jon Staekebye, Kongsberg OGT and Prof. Bjarne Foss, IO Center/NTNU
Up now is TNO’s Ruud van der Linden, talking about mature fields. TNO runs contract applications somewhere between industry and academia, founded by government with industry application, “similar to Norway’s Sintef”. Modeling of flow phenomena which they use for optimization of well extraction.
[Note to self – with Vidar Hepsø, STS scholar and petroleum anthropologist, sitting as my neighbor at the table, I am reminded of one of his articles where he points out how geological mapping of reservoir knowledge does not rely on photography (realism) as a form of truthful knowledge.
Instead, for example, the body of a geologist to determine scale.
I noticed Ruud van der Linden use photographic image of a well-bore to depict reality, versus a previous image on gas extraction represented in the form of a graph which I communicated to Vidar as a data point.]
Prof. Bjarne Foss, Dept. of Engineering Cybernetics, IO Center/NTNU: Transforming mechanical artifacts into intelligence. Downstream increasingly automating complex operational decisions by merging: real-time process data, with mathematical models and mathematical optimization.
Moving this process upstream — capitalizing on shrinking margins (downstream has always attempted to get by on capitalizing on small margins, and market affect that is now moving to the upstream). Looking for a system over time that can assure highly continued optimization.
“party”
“no-party”
Plenary III: R&D and Innovation
Paulo Viana, IO Coordinator, PETROBRAS — A project has to end, because it is a project, but the structure has to provide model for facing the future in an effective way, a transformative layer, so that each function sees the other function and collaborates and integrates.
Up now is Jon Kvalem, Director, IO Center/Institute for Energy Technology, talking about collaborative environments in the oil and gas industry. Thinking about what IO Center has achieved in collaboration and Innovation – utilizing new IO technologies, SOFIO. Structured Observations with Feedback of IO Interaction (SOFIO). There is the IO Map (Risk visualization prototype) and the scenario visualizer. Referring now to Statoil’s Logistics and Emergence of Response Center and ENI capability development and organization development — challenges in the Barents Sea.
“impression management – recognizable logo seen at a distance“
Senior Vice President, Statoil, Lars Høier, speaking on standardization is the new innovation. Moving into an area of cost cutting – we just have to think differently and define the next generation standards. A lot of opportunities if you attack it in the way of standardizing the industry context. The relationship between research and industry in standardization: More complex projects; capital costs increased; high oil price but lower margins (is seen consistently); Research and technology is part of the solution.
Using examples from Norwegian continental shelf. (1) Fast model update first in use 2010 (Grane Snorre, Sverdrup, Peregrino, 8 other committed); Pin Point first use in 2010 – better well placements for well drilling (Asgard, Njord Hyme, Snorre); AICD Valve and iRips (Barents Sea, 8 wells on Troll = 2400 valves).
Fast track, 40% less time to production; US onshore lowering drilling cost; Cat rigs, higher operational efficiency; Floating storage units; Stadardized equipment and modules; Vertical x-mss trees; Standard production weeks; Subsea on slim legs — A lot of innovation to success [uses the word “attack” repeatedly to talk about lowering costs in the context of standardization].
Technology of deep dive — subsea factory. Subsea Factories – Brown field factories — that we plan to tie in. technology elements as simplification
Second day
Torstein Sanness, Managing Director, Lundin Norway, focused on organic growth strategy and exploration. Replacing reserves. Around since 2004. New Norway – High North, same size as the Norwegian sector on the continental shelf. Keeping the company focused looking at oil liquids with 60 licenses. If you want to be at the edge and try technology before anyone else, and be in a major discovery every third year, you need innovation. Open culture meeting with workers every week demonstrating growth.
Dinner comments Torstein Sanness
Pieter Kapteijn, Director, Fossil Future – Norway’s capability cluster (government, business, academia). Quotes John Lennon, “Life is what happens to you when you’re making other plans”. Sierra Oil and Gas. Presented the idea of “Smartness”. Fascinated by Helge Lund, what do leaders of IOCs worry about, what IO (innovative operation) really is and what it offers, what we have achieved, the role of leadership in IO. The true belief in leadership that technology can make a difference. Worrying about higher costs that eat into the margins. Not confidence that they will find the resource, moving into more difficult areas, the resources discovered are more challenging, expensive EOR, Arctic, there are new competitors.
Disintermediation– Service companies are becoming exploration and production companies; A defining debate for oil industries is climate change – creating pressures.
Becoming an increasingly competitive company, looking at complexity and wanting to find simplicity — when faced with such challenges what do you do? In the past, simple, low risk –defer projects and investments; quick results –laying off staff, tried and tested; chase cost reduction–sell assets; minimum disruption–no changes to business model. But what if these changes are more fundamental? At what point do you make structural changes to business? Invest in new capabilities: Create new partnerships- creating new ecologies to allow business to move faster; rethinking and redesigning business.
At the core: cybernetics. Looking at systems thinking to look at the organization of your business.
Creating an enabling organization. Creating an environment that works. Business value of IO [smart wells] has been proved in the field: and we have only scratched the surface. Creating a better risk profile. How do we make something that is integrated across disciplines and make it work.
Are you trying to control or enable; are you standardized or organic; do you want hierarchical or flat; is it a tight or loose organization; address all these issues. Bent-Ove Jamtli begins with an anecdote of his early experience in the army with Helge Lund, working in a small Saami town in the High Arctic, and talking about search and rescue.
Vegard Evjen Hovstein, CEO of Maritime Robotics AS. [cybernetics in certain ways became the surprise word over the past two days with a few folks paying homage to its meaning in the context of IO, ed.]
Vegard referred to this interesting automatic versus autonomous systems, referring to the Center for autonomous marine operations and systems in the Arctic.
Up now is Eldor, remote operations in the context of IO presented by Ove Heitmann Hansen, Managing Director, Eldor AS. Moving remote operations to even more remote. Why should pilots be sitting at the front of the plane with the best view? Why not move them back with a computer screen, or off the plane altogether. Similarly, using information technology to change work processes to achieve better decisions – technology enables remote control of equipment and processes. Functions and personnel can be moved from offshore to onshore.
Generation 1 case – BP Valhall, offshore and onshore control room with shared control responsibilities. Level 2 Partial Onshore Control – shared control from a remote location – at Valhall this means offshore & onshore control room with shared responsibilities for operations and surveillance between offshore and onshore. 
Generation 2 case – Total’s Martin Linge – One control center with four control suites —
Final panel: Trond Lilleng, Statoil; Tony Edwards, StepChange Global; Kaare Finback, Knogsberg; Pieter Kapteijn, CEO Sierra; Arne Holhjeim, Norwegian Petroleum Directorate.
Lilleng: IO steps, production to projects, moving gradually stepwise expert stepwise establishments.
Edwards: Managing inherent complexity; value chain integration.
Finback:
Kapteijn: Pervasive sensing, unlimited computing power, plug and play modeling, unlimited data capture, unlimited bandwidth, molecular/nano scale engineering
Holhjeim: Norwegian Petroleum Directorate — good management, efficient, as much resource out of the ground as possible, minimize environmental impact.
Posted in Paparazzi Ethnography, tagged Trondheim on April 24, 2013| Leave a Comment »
Epilogue: Strong inaugural meeting of the Nordic STS conference. Jane Summerton, co-chair, was an absolutely gracious host, and delighted by our connection with Gene Rochlin, the latter now retired from Energy Resources Group, UC Berkeley, thanking her again for her edited volume back in the 1990s on large technical systems where Gene has a fabulous article on nuclear power in comparative national program perspective.
4/25: Merete Lie — Scale and imagination in scientific imaging. Inscription devices as mediators: interpretations based on recognition mediating among researchers to the public — manipulation has been used to make images legible, are conventions in science changing to reflect images that are immediately recognizable (colorful colors), the factual and unbiased are becoming more emotional, and what does that do to our body, at a molecular level [?] The concept of entification, Things that are becoming thingy that were once abstract. People had habits before, eating during the night, now we put a label on it, “night eater” — increased diagnosis through visualization. Cells today are getting an identity.
How cell images use the concept of “portrait”, a recognized genre in Western culture, and that they appear in the same size, sperms are very different sizes than cells, but are presented to us in the same size. Same scale, a human image, a cell, all appearing with the same background — special criteria when you choose to display a cell, color, shadow, and images are more recognizable to us, even when the content is very new to us. An emphasis on the individual in Western culture, as the proof of uniqueness.
Existence independent of the body, from cells as biological composition to autonomous entities, paving the way for commodification of cell, and a change in cultural understanding of the cell.
Anja Johansen: Becoming electricity, becoming molecular: Notions of the body in the art installation of Wave UFO.
Wave UFO, Mariko Mori, 1999-2002. Translating electrical signal into imagery.
Non evasive way of measuring brain activity by examining electricity in the skull, measuring the voltage fluctuation resulting from the ionic neurons. The method was invented and standardized during the 1920s, Hans Berger, reported observations “Das Electroencephalogram” on EEG (Electroencephalography).
Everyone has brain waves, but some make better subjects than others, and EEG only measures in the outer area.
Epilepsy diagnosis, but also gaming, related to learning, in the 1960s, alpha waves were used in experimental music, as reflected in the “brainball” game.
IBVA – Interactive Brainwave Visual Analyzer, geared for artists, intuitive imaging.
Art markets and the experience economy;
EEG and the visualization of the invisible;
Black-boxing/mystification of technology.
The technology opens up a more fundamental creativity, uncertainty and improvisation in music and the arts, while in science, the program is oriented toward control and predictability.
Up next — Movie: Having a skilled eye versus common sense and emotions as a rhetoric in determining meaning of the visual.
Visual styles are manipulated (photoshop) highlighting what they are looking from, using colors based on thresholds through photoshop and other programs (“ooh, that scientist just discovered that filter”) — but each school, organization or laboratory develops their own style, and the most successful images are those developed by well developed science houses, for which other seeks to replicate that style.
Manipulation and direct information.
Image competitions in science: god and bad, enhances popular reception of science but also distracts from primary scientific knowledge. “Glowing” images are important in media to represent [brain] activity. We are soaked in medical cliches, of computer generated images about the body.
Artist Andew Carnie and Scientist Richard Wingate, The Magic Forest — the very feeling of looking at the brain, peering down at the microscopic world of the brain. A program like CSI, a logical deconstruction of pathology, and the fetishization of laboratory work [movie directed by Anwar Saab on biomedical imaging].
As an aside: The representation of an industry (energy, biomedicine) as a visual impact and historical, almost cultural form.
Session 5.2
Images and narratives in climate change debates and policy
Susanna Lidstrom: Environmental ocean images, scientific, popular and political debates. The idea that the sea is remote and inaccessible, a different world; events in the sea get less attention than if they happen on land; that the ocean is so large that it can dilute anything; less research on human relations to the ocean than other environments —
Why do marine concerns receive less attention than others environmental debates? What determines levels of concern, how do scientists influence debates? What are the main attitudes that shape our understaning of the sea? How has our understanding of the sea developed in the age of environment? Which technologies enable us to know about the sea?
Invisible narratives. How do you create narratives about things you can’t see, predict, uncertain predictions, long term implications, global impacts.
The Sea: Waste and Wonder —
Aquariums, how do you showcase the ocean. Digital visualizations. 
Katarina Larsen: Narratives and images of energy behavior, consumer participation as de facto climate policy.
The power of stories (Gabriel 1998, 2004) to be tempted, seduced and deceived. Environmental futures studies and users of new technology, users and expectations about behavioral change in new technology (Larsen & Hojer 2007, Larsen et al. 2011); Consumer as self-reflecting user (of their own energy consumption); consumer as signal of new markets (renewal and diversify for niche groups); consumer as a data point (analysis of large groups of people rather than individuals); current users to identify future consumers (energy futures). Visualizations for bridging the gap between an abstract concept of climate change and everyday life, Nicholson-Cole (2005) – Interactive experience of climate change (vs energy game) — how and whether they can personally do anything about it.
Roles of users of renewables (solar) energy (a) knowledge production and new roles of customers in research and development (b) approach of workshops with solar cell owners and potential future solar cell owners, active in blogging about solar cells….
Miryase Christensen: Images of climate change policy and ice. How knowledge about climate change was produced and circulated through media, the latter central actors in relations of definition. Satellite imagery, computer technology, large scale infrastructure. Where there are hundreds of stories in the Guardian and NYTimes there was only sparse coverage in Sweden, indicating a lack of consensus in the former countries over climate change.
Elena Parmiggiani and Vidar Hepsø. Mobilizing heterogenous forces in the modeling of data: from perplexity to institutionalism.
Distribution of Lophelia corals and oil and gas operations: re-negotiating space. How can coral reefs co-exist with oil and gas, that is, how can reefs be represented to reflect risk? Why now? Meaning, now, the reefs have been taken from the dark bottoms to be represented on the computer screen, and recorded, measured, stored, in different formats, timescales.
Granting Lophelia a due process: “given a microphone to express its thoughts”; different other forces in oil and gas need to be enrolled and consulted, given weight to assess their legitimate interest; leading to a new phase or institutionalization of hierarchy.
Giving a real-time claim to Lophelia, where interests are represented indirectly — emerging information infrastructure (highly social entanglements of making Lophelia an actor), due process as a way of democratizing design and representations.
Bryan Wynn. Key Note speech: Science versus Expertise- where expertise leads toward advice in the context of decision making. Science is something else, not necessarily involved in purposeful decision making. Feels marginal to social science, because social science does not question the social end of the science – public relationships. Doing publics with science in mind. The question of science and what it has meant to mean and what meanings are given to it by various publics. We have to understand what publics experience as science and other meanings that are imposed upon on publics.
Different versions of science which are articulated and enacted in society: innocent understanding (research); new factor of production (global capitalism and economy); new factor of public authority and justification; author of public meanings (risk, security);
Science doesn’t just inform policy but legitimizes those decisions, taking on a normative role, and thus biased in favor of one outcome over another.
Science is continually acting with significant audiences in mind, imagined publics — with an eye toward establishing credibility.
4/26: Session 6. Energy as relations: knowledge practices and the environment
Lea Schick and Brit Ross Winthereik: Innovating Energy Futures: Smart Grid as Relations
Smart Grid objects. “Innovation delegation” – smooth collaboration presentation (instructions given on how to behave–seeing, interacting, connecting). Jig saw puzzle as metaphor of putting pieces in alignment. Diagram –“display of the relations between forces which constitute power. … it is a machine that is almost blind and mute even though it makes others see and speak” (Deleuze 1991:31).
Sensibility to non-discursive visual apparatuses of innovating futures (saying); Models for future diagrams-governing architectural arrangements (user inscription; Locate innovation as emerging in inter-subjective and inter-objective relations; Diagrams of innovation and imagination).
Two smart grid objects: Systems’s Worlds & Nodes in a Network. M. Foucault. “…Manet makes representation visible to itself. In so doing he also makes subjectivity visible to itself at the same time” (Hetherington 2011:468). [subject and object]
Question about gender.
B.R. Winthereik and Laura Watts: Cutting Edges: Place and futures in marine renewable energy
Alien energy. Wave resource distribution. A non-place for future making in typically future making terms. Peripherality part of the branding efforts, “World’s end — and therefore a place for new beginnings”, “a remote area” — multiple ontologies, center-periphery rules out worlds that are not the same deep down. Taking seriously lives at a dead end.
Cemetery with lights. Peripheries and particularities. European Marine Energy Center — creating Center’s elsewhere. Center versus institute [?]. Far from the center in so many ways that matter. Transduction: transformation of matter from one matter to another. Human actors and nature enter into relations that have agentive affects — edge is a type of instrument.
The materiality of edge [or as material semiotic]. Working the world analytically. Crown and local ownership. Orkney waves, electrons, and local ownership.
A cultural experience. Watching waves so long they begin to run into the opposite direction from land to sea. [Italo Calvino, Reading a Wave] unable to analyze/read a wave into universal knowledge. Creating a tool for analyzing particularities.
A: Not able to generalize, but not willing either. Threshold — edge brings to mind the concept of threshold, and thus, that which has potential and not spent.
James Maguire: Icelandic Energy Transitions: from natural resources to energy politics
Energetic Cityscapes and landscapes, inverse NIMBY, visibility and energy embeddedness, ownership and aesthetics. Renewables energy for megaprojects (aluminum bauxite mined from S.A. with fossil fuels) + The Green Cloud, data service sites [how dirty is your data]. Reconfiguration about privacy under consideration by parliament in light of energetic development — attract and reconfigure what is going on. What types of politics are performed in renewable energy worlds?
Paparazzi Ethnography 