Oilfield Services Giant Baker Hughes Taps Oqton to Increase 3D Printing Adoption in Energy

Oqton, a Belgian software company specializing in solutions for the additive manufacturing (AM) sector, announced that the company has entered into an agreement to develop and commercialize software for Baker Hughes, one of the world’s largest oilfield services companies. Through the partnership, Oqton will integrate its signature Manufacturing OS software platform with the catalog of AM processes that Baker Hughes has developed and accumulated over the past decade.

Moreover, once that initial phase of the partnership has been completed, the companies plan to expand the resultant software platform with further applications and plug-ins, as part of a strategy to branch out into other markets beyond oil & gas. Especially, Oqton and Baker Hughes seem intent on applying their joint expertise to other industries that face the most stringent regulations, such as healthcare and aerospace.

In a press release announcing Oqton’s partnership agreement with Baker Hughes, the senior VP and general manager of Oqton, Dr. Ben Schrauwen, commented, “Our mission is to accelerate making autonomous manufacturing accessible to companies of all sizes, enabling the continuous flexibility and adaptability of manufacturing processes. Through this collaboration, we see the potential to make a significant leap forward in enhancing our Manufacturing OS by leveraging the expertise of Baker Hughes’ engineering team to accelerate the manufacturing workflow and facilitate regulatory compliance.” The VP for completions and well interventions at Baker Hughes, Jim Sessions, said, “Digital transformation is the center of gravity in the advanced manufacturing processes. We believe that to achieve an efficient and reliable process we need to enable automation and autonomous controls in our end-to-end manufacturing workflows.”

As I frequently mention, there is a strong multifaceted argument to be made in favor of the oil & gas industry’s vastly expanding and rapidly accelerating its adoption of AM-driven digitization. One of the most crucial elements to that argument is that doing so could allow oil & gas companies to move as seamlessly as possible into alternative energy sectors, if those companies can leverage advanced manufacturing technologies to take direct control over their own equipment supply chains.

This particular story has added another, highly significant wrinkle to that overall argument: AM could potentially allow oil & gas companies to expand into sectors that have little or nothing to do with supplying energy, at all. This has implications not only for the oil & gas sector, but also for the economy-at-large, and above all, for the paramount 21st century consideration of decarbonization.

One of the most difficult angles involved in reducing overall carbon emissions is that fossil fuels are so inextricably tied to economic growth — while maintaining near-term economic growth is, in turn, indispensable if the necessary transition to renewable energy is to be successful. Thus, as much as oil & gas companies may deserve to fail for moral reasons, there are, in the end, unassailable practical considerations dictating that the fossil fuel industry has to be viewed as a key decision-maker in the energy transition.

With that said, all of the economic growth represented by fossil fuels will not be able to be replaced simply by forcing oil & gas companies to become renewables providers. Thus, it is reasonable to expect that the world’s largest stakeholders in manufacturing will try to break down as many barriers as they can, between the supply chains of all the various heavy industries. It seems likely, then, that Oqton and Baker Hughes are at the forefront of what should be an increasingly noticeable trend.