Equinor adopts smart network service for Norway drilling payments

Offshore staff

HOUSTON – Equinor has contracted Data Gumbo to provide the ‘smart contract network’ GumboNet service.

The goal is to ensure transactional certainty with Equinor’s drilling and wells services (IDWS) providers, starting on the Norwegian continental shelf. The frame agreement also provides the basis for company-wide application for all relevant contract categories.

Andrew Bruce, founder and CEO of Data Gumbo, said: “Smart contracts are playing a critical role in driving the energy industry forward. Our work with Equinor clearly demonstrates the benefits that supermajors and their supply chain customers, partners, and vendors experience by automating commercial transactions.”

The arrangement is designed to help Equinor achieve savings, efficiencies, and improved transparency, allowing the company to take on complex contracts and invoices while reducing processing time from weeks to a few days.

GumboNet manages 150 different billing triggers, 17 unique payment methods, and data from Equinor’s drillships, platforms, offshore service vessels, aviation providers, and third-party data managers and service suppliers.

The smart contracts are said to have successfully created 99.7% accurate invoices with no human intervention during initial trials with Equinor’s historical data.

To automate the execution of the offshore contracts, Equinor and its service partners provide data from their digital systems and Industrial Internet of Things sensors to the GumboNet private network.

These contracts then combine data with business rules and pricing to deliver what Data Gumbo describes as “a contract to create an auditable, immutable and shared record of truth enabling the automation of invoicing and payments.”

This approach, the company claims, should eliminate 95% of payment delays, invoicing errors, disputes and complicated reconciliations, in the process lessening the costs of and resources needed to administer contracts and supply improvements in joint interest billing.

Equinor may now extend the service to its Brazilian-operated assets, said Erik Kirkemo, senior vice president for Drilling & Well in Equinor.

01/28/2022