Thus was the message Woodside CEO Peter Coleman gave at the launch of Cisco's new IoE Innovation centre at Curtin University in Perth yesterday, which will use the Australian major's Pluto and North West Shelf projects as its pioneer projects.

The centre is also involved with the Square Kilometre Array project in Western Australia's Murchison region, and will move into the agriculture sector.

CSIRO has also signalled its intent to partner with the centre, which is the first of its kind in Australia and Cisco's eighth globally.

"We really want Woodside to be a leading innovator in the oil and gas industry, which is one that prides itself on the adoption of technology but is a very slow adopter," Coleman told the launch.

"Everything we do is maths and science based, yet it takes us eight years on average to adopt new technologies. Can you imagine if we were a software company? We'd be out of business.

"So there's the challenge for us as an industry. We don't actually benchmark ourselves against our peers anymore in this particular sector. They will do nothing but hold us back through their systems and the way they manage risk."

Using IoE, Woodside's "plant of the future" will link its vast knowledge base with artificial intelligence, data analytics and advanced sensors and control systems.

"This partnership will create a globally competitive centre for excellence that could be leveraged in our LNG operations, as we progress our remote operations capabilities," Coleman said.

Cisco chief technology officer Kevin Bloch, one of the central driving forces behind the centre, loosely described IoE as: "Things [such as Woodside] produce data, we take it and do something smart with it, we change processes and impact people".

As Coleman described it, what Woodside brought to the table was what was often missing early on in such partnerships: data, which was its intellectual property.

"We work in an industry that is data rich and analysis poor, because we ‘hardwire' our analysis, like the old copper cable," he said.

"The measure of GDP and economic growth in countries has fundamentally changed because the old measures used to include copper cable - how many phones you had in your house. Now most people don't need their home phone."

This underlines the way technology has changed the way companies respond to problems.

Bloch said Cisco estimated conservatively three years ago that IoE could be worth $19 trillion to the world in potential savings and additional revenue by 2023.

However, multinational consultancy McKinsey said this week it could be worth $11 trillion per annum by 2025.

Promising Pluto

Woodside's senior vice-president science, technology and strategy Shaun Gregory said there were 10,000 data points streaming off the LNG plant at Pluto alone on a daily basis, which its team had analysed to "see how we can increment and see variations in production to be able to get more value out of our plant".

This would, in turn, increase Woodside's revenue by using that data, turning it from information into "something that we can use", Gregory said.

As a case study, he showed the acid gas removal unit at Pluto, which stripped carbon dioxide from the natural gas.

"This is a complicated piece of kit which, in the past, when there's been an incident an alert has happened and it's been flagged for an action - but it's been a reaction," Gregory told the launch at Curtin.

"So we struggled to keep up with what the plant is doing.

"By looking at all the data across the plant, now we can predict when that incident is coming up to a week ahead. By being a week ahead we can be proactive in sending out maintenance crews and stopping the incident before it happens.

"That's using the IoE - using the technical knowledge to interpret and gain an insight into it."

Gregory said Woodside had entered into the partnership "because fundamentally we know we can't do this on our own.

"We need to spawn a new talent to come into our organisation of small and medium enterprises to help solve these problems, to gain those early advantages," he said, indicating how the partnership would be a defacto recruitment vehicle for Woodside.

"We know what to do, we just need help in getting the right insights, and importantly create that ‘sandbox environment'. That's what we see this for: an agile environment [where] we push problems into it so others can collaborate and see whether or not we can deploy those solutions."

This is all part of the refocusing and reorganisation that Woodside undertook earlier this year. Now the company has a science team dedicated to this area.

"We know [we need to] be at the leading edge of new developments … and science is the key to maintaining our competitive edge, which may not necessarily be among our peer group," Coleman said.

"There could be somebody out there developing a new battery, somebody born in a place that doesn't produce oil and gas but has a commitment to different energy types.

"The developing world is embracing technology because they're not burdened by legacy assets.

"Those who have increment, those who have not innovate. We need to move our business to a world where we are innovators. We must always believe that we don't have, and change the culture of our organisation."

WA advantage

Coleman said Western Australia was ideally suited to host such a centre as it had a culture of innovation, which was best exemplified in West Perth, home to many resources companies.

"[WA] also has an installed asset base that's second to none - and it's a new asset base," he said.

"It has installed over the past five to 10 years probably more data generation capacity than any state in the world, through the new plant infrastructure that has been invested.

"Our challenge now is to grab that data, unlock it and truly become world leading. We don't need to be second in this.

"We want to move from being opinion-based to fact-based in our decision making. We want to be predictive.

"Currently we run our businesses like a blind person running a marathon - we run on bells. We want to run our business like an F1 racing team, like Daniel Ricciardo predicting three corners out where his braking position should be, monitoring the engine and tyre temperatures and so forth, getting the very best out of both car and team.

"Where are we? Well, we've just recognised the opportunity, and we're already making great strides in our business. This is an important opportunity for both Perth and Australia.

"When we started our digital journey we had to go to the world to learn it, it did not exist in this state. Now the world can come to us."