Under pressure: how GE Oil & Gas is engineering its way through tough times for the sector

It is no secret that the oil and gas industry is facing tough times.

Crude oil prices have dropped by almost 50 percent since their high of $155 a barrel last summer. And while the International Monetary Fund predicts prices will gradually recover – at least partially – over the coming years, it expects them to go no higher than around $70 a barrel for the next decade or so.

What’s more, the decline in mature oil fields such as those in the North Sea is pushing producers to explore sites in deeper waters, meaning they are operating in far more challenging conditions.

As a result, companies in the industry are increasingly looking to technology to help them succeed in the face of these competing pressures, according to Federico Noera, the global subsea systems engineering general manager for General Electric Oil & Gas. “The market is really pushing for an overall optimisation in costs,” he says. “But this is coupled with the need to extract oil from harsher and more complex environments, which often have a high degree of corrosion-causing chemicals and contaminants, and the need to deploy components at fairly high water depths, at fairly high pressures.”