By Manish Srivastava
The future is very promising for Well Integrity Engineers. With the scope of projects increasing as we continue to progress as ‘bridging’ agents into ‘new energy’ integrity world in the energy transition. Oil and gas will continue to remain pertinent and the skills gained will transfer to key and growing industries, such as CCUS, geothermal, H2 storage, and so on for well integrity. During the transition, skill repurposing will be required to fulfil the growing energy industry demands. Engineers will be armed with massive amounts of data that must be structured and analyzed to make useful assessments.
Digitization combined with AI/ML is going to be necessary. Well integrity core skills will have to be coupled with IT skills to exploit tools such as IOT, cloud computing, and digital twin to make scalable models for efficient decision making. It is evident that all the skills and competence required for a well-integrity domain cannot be covered by a single individual. Future WI engineers may be specialized for different life cycle stages or have a governance / regulatory role. The future is bright.