Business & Money | Wednesday 15 April, 2015 2:26 pm |

In an era of lower prices but rising demand, Middle East oil and gas companies are urged to innovate from growing volume to optimizing their operations to support economic growth, industry experts announced today.

While global oil prices reached their lowest level in four years in 2014, global oil demand is set to grow by more than 21 percent in 2015 from 960,000 barrels/day to in 2014 to 1.17 million barrels/day in 2015, according to a recent report from the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).

From 2014-2015, the Middle East will be the world’s second-fastest growing region for oil demand, particularly from the UAE, Qatar, and Kuwait, according to OEPC.

OPEC shows oil and gas is a key contributor to GCC countries’ GDP, including 60 percent of Kuwait’s, 55 percent of Qatar’s, 50 percent of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s, and 40 percent of the UAE’s.

“While it may seem counter-intuitive for Middle East oil and gas companies to invest in technology now, they need to face the new reality of lower oil prices, and innovate their operations from growing volume to enhancing value from their operations, to support the rising energy demands and economic growth,” said Maher Chebbo, General Manager of Energy & Natural Resources, SAP EMEA.

Demonstrating the strong demand for technology solutions in the oil and gas sector, 70 percent of oil and gas companies will invest in evolving their IT by 2016, when connectivity-related spending will increase by 30 percent over 2014, according to IDC’s “Worldwide Oil & Gas 2015 Predictions”.

Middle East oil and gas companies are shifting investment to solutions across Big Data, cloud, and mobility to optimize operational efficiency, increase profitability, and guard against price volatility.

In particular, oil and gas companies are looking at solutions that leverage Big Data for optimizing capital spend and production management, supporting sustainable operations with a real-time energy platform, ensuring an effective talent management strategy, and enabling mergers and acquisitions.

As part of SAP’s continued support for innovation in the oil and gas sector, the company is working with Shell to develop a new well and reservoir facility management solution enabled by SAP HANA – the company’s in-memory computing platform – to accelerate analytics, business processes, and sentiment data processing to increase early production and improve resource optimization.

SAP is also working with the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company and its group of companies to deploy key business solutions across exploration and production, marketing and refinery, finance, human resources, procurement, and supply chain management requirements built on a common platform.

SAP counts more than 800 oil and gas customers worldwide, including 85 percent of the Fortune 2000 oil and gas companies, and SAP customers produce more than 70 million barrels/day.

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