GUYANA Telephone and Telegraph Company (GTT) Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Justin Nedd, said the company has set up an oil and gas unit and will be investing heavily to increase the tremendous data needed for the “Digital oilfield”.
The Digital Oilfield is the umbrella term for technology-centric solutions that allow companies to leverage limited resources.

Nedd, at a Guyana Press Association (GPA) lunchtime lecture at Moray House Trust on Tuesday, noted that the digital transformation continues to be the keynote of the coming years for operators across the oil and gas sector.
He explained that digitalisation is nothing new to the sector and the ability to examine and model data and trends rapidly help operators make optimal economic tradeoffs, maximising sustainability and profit.

More specifically, he alluded to the fact that oil companies use algorithms that analyse data about the well and then automatically adjusts the pump’s rate of operation for best results.
In the oil and gas sector, he said the fibre-optic cable is not merely providing public Internet services to companies like ExxonMobil, but secures private network capacity for the movement of big data.

“They get lots of data, they could send it to Trinidad, send it to Houston and it’s not necessarily over the Internet, of course, for privacy concerns because the Internet is a public network. The cable could also be used as a private transport network, separate from the Internet,” Nedd noted.

With over 60,000 subscribers for the Blaze Internet, Nedd said the growing demand for Internet and data amounts to 50 per cent of its purchased capacity.

As such, he noted the company plans to invest US$50M more to enhance its systems.
He said although the company’s fibre-optic cable runs on the sea bed, the company is not worried about any damage by ExxonMobil’s operations, since the company seeks a no-objection from GTT each time it conducts drilling on the Stabroek Block where the submarine fibre-optic cable runs.