“Reservoir engineering was too boring for me”

“Our industry is back in business,” says Lone Margrethe Olstad enthusiastically when we meet on Teams. And so is AGR, the company she joined four months ago, as it has the ambition to grow the subsurface consultancy, evalu­ations and reserves and resources due diligence advisory. Not only in Norway, where they have broad experience and have worked on almost every single field, but also abroad.

Lone is determined to make it a success. She not only relies on the expertise of her Reservoir Management and Subsurface advisory team, which consists of almost 100 specialists from all the main G&G disciplines, but she also relies on her own skills and experience to make this happen.

“I’m from a small village in Norway, and possibly be­cause of that, I am quite down to earth and tend to call a spade a spade,” Lone says. “When I joined the industry, I really had to learn how people communicate in the oil business, where it is a bit more formal at times.”

The buzz of operational challenges

If there is one thing that characterises Lone, it is that she has always jumped on opportunities. “I’m bored quite easily,” she admits with a smile. She started her career as a reservoir engineer at ExxonMobil. “But being a reservoir engineer was too slow for me,” she laughs. “It is a little too passive, as you tend to just turn the wheels on your sim­ulation software and wait for a result, without too many surprises happening.”

What attracted Lone much more is the production en­gineering side of the business. “You get involved with man­aging production by adjusting the wells,” she says. “It’s very hands-on. And then there are the operational challenges that happen all the time, for instance, when a well shuts down all of a sudden. It creates a buzz that I thrive on.”

When she had the opportunity to become the first petroleum engineer at newcomer Marathon Oil in Nor­way, she didn’t hesitate to apply and was offered the job. “I loved it,” she says, “I was thrown in at the deep end. It also proved that I was made for the engineering side of things.”

I like to jump on challenges and get things moving

But her ambition stretched further than operating the nuts and bolts of the oil field. She had always as­pired to become a leader. It didn’t last long before she got the opportunity.

A new way of working

“With Aker BP, she explains, “I stood at the base of an entirely new way of working with contractors on develop­ment projects. We called it alliances, which replaced the old way of working with contracts in a top-down fashion. In the alliance model, we acted as a team with common goals, and thereby shared the responsibility with the con­tractor of arriving at the same product as before, but in a more efficient and cost-effective way.

“And this model is still alive today,” Lone tells me, “whilst I’ve been away for quite a few years now. Some­thing must work all right there.”

A lot of magic tends to happen in oneto-one conversations

“What was the secret to implementing this new way of working?” I ask. “Lots of one-to-one conversations,” Lone says. “I think you need to have a feel for the internal dynamics in the team, and get those who enjoy the most respect in the team with you. That takes time, but I felt like I succeeded in doing so.”

Delivering added value

Before starting at AGR earlier this year, Lone spent al­most five years with Cognite, a company in the E&P software business. “It was a very different environment from what I had seen thus far,” she says. “Fast-paced, young, dynamic, and round the clock. Plus, a lot of fo­cus on creating added value for clients, while managing people and budgets. That’s ultimately what that type of business is about, which is very different from an oil and gas operator, where the largest investments ultimately are tied up in tangible hardware. In that sense, the expe­rience I gained as an independent subject matter expert is something I now bring into a consultancy like AGR, which operates in many of the same ways – delivering added value.”

But it was the big projects, the redevelopments, the wells, the technical engineering, that drew Lone back into the consultancy world. “I feel we have a good export prod­uct,” she says. “True, Norway has something to learn when it comes to the speed with which some projects are being carried out, but the technical expertise is world-class.”

Faster and with less resources to first production

There is now an increased awareness in the industry that near-field developments can’t simply take ten years to de­velop. It has to be brought down to no more than three. Lone’s work with Aker BP also comes in handy here. “I already showed that working in an alliance framework has the genuine potential to speed up projects, which is exactly what we are trying to do now with our clients at AGR. That’s why we are already talking to some clients to implement that model of establishing a more integrat­ed team, covering reservoir, wells, facilities, marine, and digital solutions,” Lone explains.

Her first few months has consisted of a lot of talk­ing and a lot of listening. But the conclusion is simple: “The industry is ready to embark on a big push to develop near-field resources faster,” reiterates Lone. “We can help with that. We are ready to apply our experience across the Norwegian Continental Shelf, and abroad, as we identified a number of potential growth areas where we see tremen­dous potential.”

With someone at the helm who likes to jump on a chal­lenge, Lone is no doubt the right person for the job.