Corvacon 2023: Illuminating the Path Forward!

Corva’s journey is about creating an environment where the industry shifts the narrative of energy as a digital laggard and takes the next wave of innovation mainstream much faster and with greater agility. The mission of the Corva App Store is to be a critical part of changing the narrative and accelerating the technology adoption curve. The critical ingredients to realizing this vision are more collaboration, building an active industry community, and the connections that events such as Corvacon make possible.

As innovation compounds and accelerates, this year's Corvacon set out to explore the exciting innovation that is fast approaching by illuminating the path forward through panel sessions, a product showcase alley, a product immersion lounge, and breakout sessions that covered diverse topics such as AI, predictive drilling, data quality, and water management.

With record-breaking attendance at Corva HQ, Corvacon once again is at the heart of digital energy transformation playing a pivotal role in assisting the energy community to boldly embrace digital and sustainable solutions; ensuring they have the tools and expertise needed to thrive in an ever-evolving landscape. In a special presentation shared by Corva's Executive Chairman, Dharmesh Mehta, and CTO Jeff Jensen, the 2023 Corvacon keynote took attendees on a journey through the past 5 years, the current energy-industry and platform focus, and the bold new direction for the future of Corva.

Like the origin story of Southwest Airlines, Corva was born out of simple, yet powerful ideas shared between a few like-minded innovators. There was no business plan, there was no financials, there was no pitch deck. It was an idea dreamed up by Ryan Dawson in a garage over seven years ago. He approached Dharmesh Mehta, a veteran of the oilfield, with a vision to change the energy industry with his cutting-edge software best practices from outside of the energy sector. Corva's Drilling platform took that initial concept to commercial launch in record time in 2018 and in just 2 years was deployed on 250 rigs in the lower 48.

From the very beginning, Corva's mission was to develop a culture for solving the hard problems that hadn't been solved before and building products that fundamentally change how the industry operates. The Company’s innovative journey continued in 2019 with the next interesting problem to solve and the release of Corva's Completions platform which was rapidly adopted on 100+ frac fleets within 2 years.

Having solved a small part of the industry’s data management and visualization challenges, Corva knew that it could not solve everything by itself, giving rise to Corva's Dev Center in 2021, accelerating innovation by democratizing app development. With Dev Center, the vast expertise and talent that exists within energy and service companies could begin building apps just as fast and just as good as Corva's. The Dev Center powered innovation for customers and partners and has since delivered 123 apps to the Corva App Store.  In the meantime, Corva continued its mission of finding and solving tough problems with the introduction of its Geoscience and Sustainability platforms in 2022.

Today, Corva has more than 10,000 users across 41 countries supported by an around-the-clock operations support center who respond to customer requests and questions in just 12 seconds. Going forward, Corva will continue to expand with dedicated capabilities for GeoDrilling and GeoCompletions to take real-time collaboration across teams to the next level. Working in tight collaboration with drilling automation partners, Corva Predictive Drilling is also in the early phases of generating measurable success with customers seeing an additional 20% to 30% ROP gain.

The future of our industry is about meeting sustainability goals and Corva is committed to creating a digital platform to empower energy companies to scale and achieve their ESG goals, whether that is through digital twins or solutions around emissions and water management.

The foundation has been set to change the well construction landscape along with the ability to break down more barriers to collaboration regardless of who or what the datasets are. Over the next few years, Corva will pivot from this technology foundation to bring a new level of optimization for higher-performing completions while equipping teams with new tools for cost management, offset well analysis, and conventional completions. As part of its future vision, Corva is also extending its Drilling and Completions platform into Production to drive a deeper understanding of how well production metrics are linked with drilling and completion quality while providing insight into better interventions and workovers.

Launched this year, Corva Fusion embodies Corva’s commitment to continuously elevate data quality. In addition to improvements in onboarding unstructured data and documents, the Fusion strategy is twofold: a focus on direct integrations to bring sources of truth into the Corva platform from systems of record through APIs (e.g., WellView), and secondly advancing confidence in data with data quality badges throughout apps and platform features. Corva users with large datasets, especially offshore, are also getting a speed boost with database upgrades that will further improve well data processing time and costs when rerunning and recalculating.

Making it one of the rare exceptions of a startup that went global, Corva Enterprise is bringing the benefits of the Corva platform to the international community, enabling Corva apps to run literally anywhere while respecting data residency and keeping data in-country.

Machine learning takes time to get right. While Corva advances its models and introduces generative AI to the platform in the future, it is also opening the doors to Dev Center to allow third-party training models to plug and play with Corva's clean, ML-ready data. And going forward ML and AI will remain a focus with new capabilities on the horizon for purpose-built data lakes to feed corporate data science projects.

Subodh Saxena, Senior Vice President at Nabors illuminated the path forward for predictive drilling automation in an informative presentation that delved into the technical and human factors holding back innovation. Keys to advancing to the next level of drilling automation are commercial-grade models and strong leadership to venture into the unknown. Beyond automating the bit, greater performance gains can only be achieved by driving greater collaboration between the technical and creative sides of the brain with generative AI. 

Moderated by Corva chief operating officer, Courtney Diezi, the Corvacon executive panel included Matthias Gatzen from Baker Hughes, David Forbes from ConocoPhillips, and Moji Karimi from Cemvita. Together this distinguished group of energy industry experts explored digital themes across the global energy industry, the role of high-quality data, and the future landscape where hydrocarbons continue to play a crucial role alongside the new, sustainable energy mix. 

Like the high stakes, split-second operations of a Formula 1 race, today's drilling and completions operations demand high-performance teams. With over a decade’s experience at the forefront of Formula 1, Bernie Collins brought her trademark voice of authority to Corvacon to give unique insights into building winning teams.

Bernie is an accomplished race strategist and engineer, most recently employed as Head of Race Strategy for the Aston Martin Formula 1 team. In 2023, Bernie joined the Sky Sports F1 broadcasting team, her race strategy expertise adding significant depth to the channel’s coverage. She also contributes to Formula 1’s official website and digital channels, providing detailed insights on race strategy and helping fans understand the complexity of decisions made during Grands Prix.

Showcasing its Drilling, Predictive Drilling, Completions, Dev Center, Geoscience, Enterprise, Fusion, and Sustainability platforms in the Showcase Alley, Corva was joined by 6 of its technology partners. Showing off apps built with Dev Center were Nabors (Predictive Drilling), Baker Hughes (ROP Optimization and i-Trak), and Cold Bore Technologies. In addition, Drill2Frac delved into its FlowFX app and MGB its FuelCELL app while INS & Solve Networks showcased solutions for oilfield equipment.

The energy industry continues to undergo rapid change as innovation accelerates, data volumes exponentially grow, and the industry enters the energy transition at full speed. More than ever the core principles of community, connection, and collaboration that Corvacon embodies are vital to meeting the challenges of today while preparing for the unforeseen challenges of tomorrow and leveraging technology for a competitive edge.

We look forward to staying on this journey into the future of energy with you. If you’d like to learn more about Corva and our innovative collection of energy apps, reach out to us here.