Known for its services and solutions in upstream oil and gas, particularly as related to production, Emerson is continuing those traditional offerings while introducing additional capabilities related to items like methane emissions, carbon capture, hydrogen and asset rationalization. These efforts are divided almost equally between North America and the rest of the world.
Interview with BRANDON BROMBEREK, Vice President, Americas, Branson Welding & Assembly/Emerson
Editor’s note: This interview with Mr. Bromberek was conducted before his latest change of position within Emerson. His former position was Vice President Oil & Gas, Measurement Solutions
Recently, World Oil Editor-in-Chief Kurt Abraham visited with Emerson’s Vice President in the Branson Welding & Assembly unit, Brandon Bromberek, Fig. 1. During their conversation, Mr. Bromberek discussed his company’s business philosophy, his sense of what operating/technical issues are driving the upstream market, and what Emerson is doing to address the needs and problems of operators worldwide. What follows is the full text of that conversation.
World Oil (WO): So, Brandon, tell us about some of the upstream products, services and/or projects that are ongoing at Emerson.
Brandon Bromberek (Bromberek): I’d say the applications that we're going after haven't necessarily changed, but there's been a lot more focus around some of them. Things like energy efficiency and emissions in the upstream space, specifically methane emissions (Fig. 2) monitoring and reporting and things of that nature, and then just trying to help people do more with less and optimize their operations. Removing people from the well site is still something that we’re working on for the safety angle, and certainly looking at leaner operations, again playing on the emissions angle. We continue to help upstream do its part in this whole energy transition and sustainability landscape. Obviously, we have a number of companies that want to improve their environmental footprint, while continuing to provide reliable and affordable energy to the world’s population. And none of the traditional things that we've been doing for decades have gone away, they’re all still super-relevant.
WO: And leak detection is something that Emerson has been involved with for quite some time.
Bromberek: Yes, part of our message is that we tackle things like process efficiency, energy consumption, and leak detection, Fig. 3. These are things that we've been doing for many years. Sometimes I hear feedback that operating in the hydrocarbon space is contradictory to developing a sustainable forward energy landscape, but we're trying to help operators get better, be more efficient, and utilize less energy along the way. Look at their leaks, detect them, report them, and keep people out of harm's way. Helping the industry be cleaner, safer, and more productive ultimately feeds the reality of the world's energy needs today. So, not to say that we're not pushing into things like hydrogen and carbon capture. Those things stand on their own. But in that core space, that's where we've been working on the things I’ve mentioned.
Let me talk a bit about the latter item. We're seeing a lot of involvement with upstream operators in the carbon capture sector. They've got the subsurface knowledge. They understand the reservoir. They know how to get things out of the reservoir. Now, we're just flipping the script and saying, “how can we safely store things in the reservoir?” And there’s also enhanced oil recovery by carbon injection. Another thing that's happened is that all these natural gas operated valves are being replaced with electrically- power models.
WO: Switching gears a bit, you’ve had experience in a number of countries overseas during your career. What was that like?
Bromberek: My former life was with an oilfield service company, and I spent time in Kazakhstan, Norway and France, in addition to the U.S. A lot of the challenges we help our customers tackle are similar across the globe. Sure, there are differences in the customer’s operating model, the reservoirs, infrastructure, supply and demand landscape, etc. There are also different priorities and drivers around energy availability, cost, and sustainability of production, but in general, the solutions we offer have a global reach.
For example, one customer might have already gone through the journey of optimizing production and is now working on how to reduce their methane emission footprint. Another may have tackled the methane emission footprint at the wellsite but needs to drive enhanced safety performance. Our goal is to ensure we are bringing a full suite of tools to customer, but then tailoring our solution to where they are at on their journey and what they are trying to achieve.
WO: In terms of geographical emphasis right now, how much of your company’s activity is still in the U.S. market, and how much is somewhere else?
Bromberek: About half of our business comes from North America, Canada included. And about half comes from outside North America. And I would point out that the regulatory environment is different in various places, and the level of our solutions is dependent on that to some extent. Obviously, we try to create demand above, and ahead, of the regulations, but when a regulation comes out, there's a solution that a customer might need, and we've got to adapt to it pretty quickly. So that's given us a lot of opportunity. But we also don't like to rely on the regulations, because then we're at the mercy of something outside of our control. Our approach is to lead our customers down a path where they can be ahead of the regulatory environment so they don’t have to alter their course when new rules or regulations are released.
The other thing that that we do a good job of is trying to advise those regulatory committees, those standards bodies in the industry—folks like API, IADC and others—on how you can get this job done. If you're looking at a custody transfer of hydrocarbons from the upstream environment to a pipeline operator, what's the equipment that you need to be using? And have we tested that equipment? What are the right technologies to bring into the fold? We do a lot of work on that end of things to help drive the right solutions.
WO: What do you think are some of the bigger technical challenges that you either face or are involved with at the moment?
Bromberek: In the upstream space, I think one of the big challenges is how do we get to a standard operating model to drive efficiency and drive costs down. If you take the U.S., for example, you've seen a lot of the M&A activity that's gone on in the industry. Well, how are you going to acquire company after company, or asset after asset, and then rationalize all the infrastructure that you end up with from multiple organizations? How do you leverage the power of that information that you have from all the instruments or devices or valves so that you can make sense out of it, and you're not sending somebody out to the field every single day?
WO: Especially if you've got a lot of one-off items in the field.
Bromberek: That's right. And so, that was a little bit of what our CTO was talking about recently, is how do you start at the device layer, but then make sure you can pull all that information and get it up to what we call “the edge.” Look at some consolidated database that still exists in the field and then take that information and get it up into some type of environment, whether it's in the cloud or elsewhere. That way, you can understand how to manage this enterprise by exception. And look at the outliers—which wells are not performing, which do I need to prioritize interventions on, and which ones do I need to just say, “hey, there's no need for me to go out and mess with it. It's working, right? We're getting the production that we need.”
What we're trying to build a message around is that there's just so much potential in the data of our devices and our solutions. So, if we can connect all those items, the information that's at your fingertips is pretty powerful for use right now. But if you've got a break in that communication chain, if you've got devices that don't talk to each other, if you've got to send somebody out to the field to take a reading and write it down, then that gets a lot harder to do.
The other thing it helps you with is in the upstream space, and we've been in a pretty good run the last four years or so. But if you're depending on your manual labor and your workforce to scale, you can never ramp up fast enough and you can never right-size your organization fast enough. If we can pull some of that manual intervention and head count out of tackling a problem, that allows our customers and those operators to scale much quicker, be in line with or ahead of the market rather than having to react, and redeploy those people to work on more value-added tasks instead of just chasing information.
It's not just a cost or operational efficiency issue when you're hiring people or when you're cutting people. That's usually when you see incidents pop up. You see people taking shortcuts. You see untrained personnel that are out in the field in harm's way. So, it connects the efficiency to the cost, and to the safety management.
On the horizon, too, everybody wants to have vision-based monitoring and predictive maintenance, where you can predict failures before they happen. But to do that, if we're talking about thousands and thousands of wells, and each one has multiple devices on it, that's where we can come in and do data analysis and get trained on data sets. As we all know, proactive maintenance is a lot better than reactive maintenance.
The other thing is you can't really get to the LNG until you have the production of the gas. We can talk a little bit about the upstream side of the natural gas value chain, feeding what goes into getting gas to places that haven't had the benefit of it in the past to feed a growing demand. If you look at a lot of the recent projections, this is not something that's going away any time soon. We've got decades ahead of us in terms of gas and whatever you want to call it, transition fuel, enabling fuel, whatever. So, how does our solution set apply to the gas space? What are the angles we can bring to bear for gas in the upstream production environment that maybe don't apply to liquids or crude production?
That's the kind of thing where we can bring not just a U.S. angle but also a global perspective. In other words, what is the play here? Where's the gas coming from? Where is it going to? What do you need in terms of infrastructure to connect the dots? And how can a company like Emerson, with our global footprint, help make that happen? When you've got certain things that need to be considered from a project management standpoint, from an execution standpoint, where you've got maybe the same operator that's producing on one end, then it's also a matter of trying to get it to their customer across the pond.
WO: And all of this can depend on where the commodity price happens to be at the moment.
Bromberek: That’s right, and we’ve seen how that can affect projects. It’s interesting, because you get into a situation where the world on one hand wants to move towards sustainability, but we actually saw gas-to-coal switching a few years ago when gas prices were high, so it can go in reverse. Right now, we're going back the other way. But sometimes that doesn't get talked about. And so, at the end of the day, the question is how can we stay on track to move towards these cleaner sources of energy? WO
BRANDON BROMBEREK is Vice President, Americas, at Branson Welding & Assembly, a unit of Emerson. He has held this position for the last four months. Previously, he was Vice President, Oil & Gas, Measurement Solutions at Emerson for four-and-a-half years from April 2020 to November 2024. He also was Vice President, Flow Solutions, at Emerson from December 2018 to March 2020. Before then, Mr. Bromberek worked at SLB for 19-and-a-half years in engineering, communications and operational positions of increasing responsibility. He earned a BS degree in mechanical engineering from Purdue University and also holds an MS degree in management from the Edinburgh Business School at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, Scotland.