Pacific Drilling Goes Digital with Oceaneering

An industry-first partnership aims to enable better, more reliable connectivity on board offshore drilling rigs, marking a key step for the implementation of new and expanded digital services.

Oceaneering International and Pacific Drilling announced Monday that they have entered into a five-year Digital Services Package agreement to provide Pacific’s customers with better reliability and improved throughput enabling streaming video and real-time data. 

Better, more reliable onboard connectivity will allow customers to leverage data to make better decisions, faster, the companies say. As a result, Pacific Drilling’s customers stand to gain higher security, increased access and management of third parties as well as emerging services such as remote ROV piloting, surveying and automation aboard Pacific Drilling’s drillship fleet.

Oceaneering guarantees service level availability for industrial and mission-critical data backed by a combination of private LTE infrastructure and next generation satellite constellations, to deliver seamless rig-wide data connectivity. From origin to destination, Oceaneering will assume 100% accountability for network uptime and remote operations offshore.

The digital transformation will enable Oceaneering to provide remote piloting and automated control technology via dedicated, onshore mission support centers currently in Stavanger and Houston, and future centers.

“We are delighted to work with Pacific Drilling to make the ‘Rig of the Future’ a reality,” said Kelly McDowell, Oceaneering’s Global Data Solutions Director. “By choosing this integrated rig services package, Pacific and its customers can increase transparency as well as worker safety by leveraging our cross-functional team to maximize efficiency.”

Corey Thompson, CIO for Pacific Drilling, said, “Applying best-in-class IT technologies and services to Pacific Drilling’s deepwater fleet helps ensure we continually deliver timely solutions to our customers’ toughest challenges. Oceaneering is the right partner to help bring about the digital transformation of our assets, allowing us to engage with and service customers as never before. This strategic investment quadruples our bandwidth conduit, lowers latency in decision-making, and accelerates our technology road map.”