It’s never easy chairing a major technology conference, and with the industry in a low oil price environment, it makes things even more challenging. But Leigh-Ann Russell is up to the challenge.

Russell, vice president of technical functions and performance for BP’s Global Wells Organization, is chairing one of the industry’s most important drilling conferences, a joint effort between the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) and the International Association of Drilling Contractors (IADC). The conference takes place March 14-16 in The Hague, The Netherlands. Russell recently spoke to E&P about the upcoming conference and her hopes for the future of the industry.

E&P: How did you get tapped to be the chairperson for this conference?

Russell: I volunteered. We do a lot of work with SPE and IADC, and when they were looking for a chair, I put my hand up because I’m a chief supporter of these organizations. I think they do incredible work for us in the industry. They rely on volunteers, so as volunteers, you have to start with yourself. I also was intrigued because I hadn’t really seen that many women chair the conference before, if there had been any. Through some of the work I do on BP’s diversity agenda, that appealed to me.

E&P: How would you describe the general state of the drilling industry, and what is the mood?

Russell: This is a tough time in industry. We’ve seen considerable restructuring, and that’s what’s really hard. The most difficult thing is seeing your colleagues leave, particularly when they don’t want to. I think we have to be respectful and mindful of that. We expect oil prices to be lower for longer, and although we’re starting to see an uptick in price, we believe that the days of $100-plus oil are probably behind us. Our industry has made great progress in reducing our cost basis while continuing to enhance the safety of our operations. It allows us to be more competitive in a low oil price world and bring stability to our industry, which is more important than a high price environment.

We’re more fit than we have been in the past. We have cut a lot of waste out of our processes and our systems. We are looking at how we can better adopt technology to stay at this competitive level. We’re not sitting around waiting for things to get better. We as an industry and we as BP are actually turning the corner and making ourselves safer and competitive at the current price environment. That feels really good to a lot of people.

E&P: The upcoming drilling conference will cover a host of technologies. What are some of the new technologies that you are particularly excited about?

Russell: We’re looking at automation and how we bring in automation from other industries to make our industry safer and more efficient. This has made us look at things very differently. We’ve brought speakers to the conference who are not traditional oil industry speakers, like McLaren, to be a bit more thought-provoking about how other industries work more effectively. Many of these companies have year-over-year cost improvements by constantly applying improvement to their processes, whereas in our industry we’re very cyclical. Looking at how they achieve these things has made BP think about things very differently. We’re going to bring a fl avor of that to the conference and hope that people go back and perhaps think a little differently about how they can make their businesses safer and more competitive.

The way that we use our data, the way that we visualize it and aggregate it, is going to be a feature of what McLaren shows us at the conference—how [the company] takes the information from its race cars and uses it in predictive mode to see what its cars are going to do next to actually help them win the race. It’s completely analogous to drilling. The drift is that we use all of the information we have on our drilling rigs not just to tell us what we’re doing at that moment but actually to help us know what’s coming ahead of us in the predictive mode. You can instantly start to see some major safety and efficiency improvements.

If our offshore teams could be freed up from doing some of their manual processes and actually have a computer drilling a section for them, they could sit back and have oversight of how that section is being drilled. That has the potential to improve safety because it provides a second level of oversight. It makes it more efficient because, no matter how brilliant you are, you can’t outmatch a computer responding to information in nanoseconds. We are currently field-testing an automated drilling system in Oman that determines the optimum drilling parameters based on analysis of data in real time. These parameters are automatically executed via the rig’s control, allowing the driller to use his or her expertise to focus on the overall drilling operation.

E&P: In your introductory letter on the conference website you mentioned, ‘providing energy in a sustainable way’ as one of the goals of the conference. What efforts are being made in that direction?

Russell: I believe sustainability touches a number of different subjects. I certainly have been through a number of downturns in this industry. There’s just a general feeling that we don’t want to keep learning the same lessons from the past. How do we stop following those trends? How do we get ourselves more efficient so that we don’t need to hire massive amounts of people and consequently have adverse effects in a downturn? We need to conduct our business in a stable manner with a stable number of people in a stable commercial regime so that we don’t follow the commodity price but continue to work efficiently and competitively in a low-price environment and then benefit even more greatly from an upturn.

That’s a model that works for the service companies and the drilling contractors too. We need to have the discipline to not just follow the trend of an upturn. And we can do that through the use of technology. We can do that through better application of how we deploy our people. There’s a whole host of things that we’ll bring to the conference that will address how we get that sustainability and stability into our industry despite the price environment.

E&P: What is your motivation to keep plugging away even though things are tough?

Russell: I was with one of our millennials recently, and she said, ‘It doesn’t feel like our industry really grabs people. We need to become ‘sexy’ like Coca- Cola.’ I didn’t even need to think about that for one second. I just turned to her and said, ‘Well, I don’t get that. Our industry provides heat. It provides light. It provides power. The more efficient and clean that we can get at doing that means that we can help people come out of poverty in the developing world. That’s what I think of our industry. Few other industries can claim to have that impact on the world.’

What a wonderful industry to be part of. Yes, things are tough right now, but our jobs are really important for the world. Not only that, but I get to do that job with a group of really amazing people. Right now the technologies that we’re looking at for how to really shape our industry in the future are tremendously exciting. I don’t want to detract from what’s happening to people in the industry right now, but we have a super bright future ahead of us. I don’t need any edge to get out of bed (most mornings, anyway) to go out and tackle this challenge with the great technology and people that we have.

Contact the author Rhonda Duey at rduey@hartenergy.com.