It's not easy to collaborate, but it's essential!
While emerging as a world leader in liquefied natural gas production, overall, Australia’s oil and gas industry is disadvantaged by the remoteness and geographical breadth of our operations, our limited infrastructure and insufficient economies of scale. These factors drive up the cost of production and make it difficult for both operators and service companies to balance the trade-offs between building scale and capability. Despite our rich resource base, these structural factors make it challenging for the Australian oil and gas industry to compete globally. Additionally, traditional project development and contracting practices rely on bespoke, bi-lateral agreements between operators and service companies, resulting in inconsistencies and inefficiencies that limit the reuse of solutions and technology, driving costs even higher. This has created an imperative for new collaborative industry platforms in areas of workforce competency management and integrated activity planning, which leverage standardised processes and common infrastructure. This paper will explain how to overcome collaboration obstacles by cultivating a culture of transparency and will discuss the steps undertaken to develop trust within a diverse stakeholder group, enabling the creation of shared solutions. This paper gives concrete recommendations on how to create a new mindset around the appropriate company structure for the development of collaborative and innovative platforms that deliver more competitive outcomes to the Australian oil and gas industry.