Solus replaces the conventional requirement for two valves with just one. (Image source: Expro)

Energy services provider Expro has launched Solus – a high-debris single shear and seal ball valve system for subsea well access

Solus replaces the conventional requirement for two valves with just one, reducing operational risk and complexity while accelerating the drive toward more cost-efficient subsea intervention technologies.

Tested and validated in accordance with API Std 17G, Solus is the first fully NACE MR0175 compliant fail-close bi-directional high-debris ball valve system that can shear and seal on wire and coiled tubing. It can be used in both in riser and open water applications across the entire well lifecycle - from exploration and appraisal and completion intervention to plug and abandonment (P&A) and decommissioning.

Solus has already been deployed for a new in-riser completions development in the Gulf of America and installed in an open water system for a North Sea P&A campaign. The system provides shear and post-shear seal for gas and liquids on slick line, braided electrical cable, and coiled tubing. It delivers bi-directional sealing for liquids and gas, even after a pump-through.

Solus has also been included in the Expro lightweight P&A Open Water Intervention Riser System (OWIRS).

Solus’ modular and compact design is an additional attraction, while its fail-close design reduces risk of emissions and provides a unique well safety barrier. It offers superior high debris (HD) flexibility for a wider range of complete well lifecycle challenges, with 15% solids ingress qualification size.

Daniel More, vice president Subsea Well Access, said, “In introducing Solus, Expro now offers the subsea engineering market a distinctive new system that provides the ultimate integrated shear and seal on coiled tubing and wire using just a single valve. Solus cuts through operational complexity. Simple to use, flexible, with a compact design for smaller BOP stack sizes, this is the latest in fail-safe technology developed by the experts of valve technology and systems integration.

“When there’s no room for error, Solus is designed to provide the assurance of an independent well safety barrier, combined with the surety and confidence that comes from Expro’s integration experience and expertise at the ‘whole system’ level. It’s the latest example of Expro’s engineering excellence and deep understanding of customer needs to move our industry forward.”

Solus is available in Expro’s ELSA landing string assemblies equipment offering. It is available in-riser as a single valve, a single valve with a latch mechanism, or within a subsea test tree, and within an OWIRS.

DUG is primed to power the next wave of discovery in the Middle East. (Image source: DUG)

Across the Middle East, oil and gas operators are acquiring larger, denser and more complex seismic datasets to unlock increasingly subtle geological targets

But as data volumes grow into the hundreds of billions of traces, the real challenge is no longer just acquisition. It is how quickly and confidently those datasets can be turned into actionable insight.

When growing data volumes are coupled with modern processing and imaging algorithms, such as elastic multi-parameter full waveform inversion, and the continued rise of artificial intelligence (AI) based workflows, the result is that high performance computing (HPC) systems are being pushed harder than ever. This of course intensifies demands on power, cooling and scalability. For energy giants, a key challenge is ensuring their HPC infrastructure remains fit-for-purpose to keep pace with modern geoscience.

Global technology company DUG is known for its state-of-the-art software and its network of some of the largest supercomputers on Earth. Against a constantly evolving hardware landscape, the Australian-born company is keeping its edge with the deployment of 82 new NVIDIA H200 machines, adding 41 petaflops of compute power to its global data-centre capacity. Each machine delivers an order-of-magnitude performance uplift over DUG’s fastest CPU-only hardware, further reducing the company’s turnaround times across both testing and production workflows.

The operational realities of a modern HPC facility also present significant opportunities for reducing both cost and environmental footprint. One way that DUG has maximised the energy efficiency of its HPC ecosystem is through the use of immersion cooling – where servers are submerged directly into a fluid that removes heat far more effectively than air. The technology supports significantly higher compute density, reduces power consumption and creates a stable environment without hot spots, dust or oxidation. Immersion allows operation at higher temperatures compared to air-cooling, thereby also reducing reliance on evaporative cooling, allowing hybrid or dry-cooling configurations that lower water use. This ultimately makes efficiency and sustainability part of the same design.

“Our data-centre upgrade significantly increases our total compute power,” said Harry McHugh, chief information officer at DUG. “This translates to even faster delivery of huge datasets and more computationally intensive workloads, from AI-inference applications, to advanced seismic processing and imaging workflows, including our revolutionary DUG Elastic MP-FWI Imaging technology”,

“Designing and operating at this scale gives us intimate knowledge of what modern HPC demands in practice – and this expertise drives the solutions we build and operate for our clients.”

With its new Abu Dhabi office supporting large-scale projects across the region, and a technology stack built around energy-efficient HPC and advanced imaging algorithms, DUG is primed to power the next wave of discovery in the Middle East, delivering faster, clearer and more reliable subsurface insights.

The new Kantori autonomous well control solution. (Image source: Baker Hughes)

Baker Hughes has launched the Kantori autonomous well construction solution at its 26th Annual Meeting in Florence, Italy

The new unified digital service provides intelligent operations and streamlined workflows across every stage of the well construction process. It combines artificial intelligence and physics-based models with real-time data analytics to continually optimise performance and enable automation across planning, execution and monitoring activities. This supports rapid decision making with limited human intervention, reducing nonproductive time and variability during well construction operations.

Kantori supports the entire well construction life cycle, from connectivity and data integration to well planning and performance optimisation. From single wells to entire fields, the scalable solution can be adapted to customer needs. It integrates Corva real-time analytics and predictive intelligence.

“Autonomous drilling has opened new frontiers for our industry, replacing reactive operations with intelligent systems that can learn, adapt and optimize performance in real time,” said Amerino Gatti, executive vice president, Oilfield Services & Equipment at Baker Hughes. “This digitally driven approach, built on decades of drilling expertise and intelligent engineering, is making well construction smarter, safer and more predictable. Baker Hughes has set the standard in this field, and Kantori marks the next chapter of digital innovation in well construction.”

Kantori is part of Baker Hughes’ end-to-end portfolio of digital solutions, which also includes Leucipa automated field production solution and Cordant Asset Performance Management software.
At the Annual Meeting, Baker Hughes also announced the latest release of Cordant (Release 26.1), featuring expanded capabilities to help customers improve operational reliability, enhance performance consistency, and support sustainability initiatives. Cordant 26.1 enhances energy and industrial operators’ enterprise-wide visibility across assets, delivering improved access to decision-grade data, and empowering a broader range of users through an increasingly open, composable and scalable platform architecture.

Aramco is generating significant business value by using AI. (Image source: Adobe Stock)

At the 2026 World Economic Forum in Davos, Aramco president and CEO Amin Nasser shared how the company’s strategic investments in AI and human capital, along with a focus on data quality, has resulted in over US6bn in realised business value

“Last year, I talked about 400 use cases that we came up with in Saudi Aramco. This year, we’re talking about 500 use cases,” he said. “100 use cases went from pilots to actual deployments. We used to have around US$200 to US$300mn in the previous years in terms of technology realised value. In 2023 and 2024, we achieved US$6bn. More than 50% of this is AI-related.

“We’ve seen the benefits of the huge infrastructure that we have built over 90 years. Everybody talks about AI, the impact of AI, but where is the value? This is what we are able to establish. We want to turn the energy sector to be more intelligent in terms of capitalising on AI.

“The 6,000 talents that we trained on AI, these are the subject matter experts that come up with the use cases,” he stressed. “The most important thing in all of this is the data quality. We have built data quality over 90 years, [and] we kept everything. Now we have over 90% of the productive zone capitalising on AI, increasing the productivity in some wells by 30 to 40%. That is huge.”

Nasser pointed out that implementing use cases is very important to demonstrate value. “It’s not about buying chips and GPUs, it’s ensuring that you have the system, that data quality. You need to see that intelligence in terms of running the operations scaled up across the industry.”

He emphasised that a lot of what Aramco adopts and scales not only applies to the energy industry, but can help other industries as well.

Also at the World Economic Forum, Aramco's executive vice president of technology and innovation, Ahmad al Khowaiter, highlighted how Aramco’s venture capital investments, industrial ecosystem, and AI infrastructure are enabling innovation at scale and reinforcing long-term profitability, noting the contribution of technology from start-ups.

“What we’re focusing on initially is AI, as that is the greatest opportunity for the century, that is the area where we’ve been able to create the biggest value for our company and we think there’s an opportunity for start-ups, especially as we’re providing a lot of infrastructure for AI in the form of our investment. We continually adopt that technology, and that technology has maintained our competitiveness and our profits over the years. Businesses don’t just have to make a profit; they have to introduce technology, because that maintains our competitive edge.”

Aramco operates some of the Middle East region’s most powerful supercomputers, including Dammam 7, and a number of NVIDIA Superpods, which help create, train and run AI models. Its industrial multi-agent AI, for example, reduces maintenance planning times from days to hours. Aramco is also taking a significant stake in HUMAIN, Saudi Arabia’s flagship AI company.

See more on Aramco's AI innovation here