Are You Prepared For the U.S. Oil and Energy Boom? Part 1

USA’s oil and energy market is expected to grow strongly this year. Is your company prepared to handle the increase in RFPs this will bring? If not, Xait can help you.

According to OilPrice.com, investments and production in the oil and gas industry will grow in 2023, especially in the U.S. market.

Oil majors such as Exxon and Chevron plan to increase their spending by 10% this year, focusing on low-carbon projects and operations in the U.S. rather than Europe.

There will be a surge in competition for projects due to this growth. Thus, oil and energy companies must quickly produce proposals, reports, and studies.

Are you equipped with the tools to create these documents efficiently enough to make your company stand out from the competition?

Let's take a closer look at what's happening in the U.S. oil and energy market before discussing how Xait can help you win projects.

Investments and Activity Will Be High in 2023

Last year, oil and gas companies reported combined earnings of almost $200 billion and reduced debt to its lowest level in 15 years. That means Big Oil has a lot of cash to fund strategies in 2023.

According to a new report by Deloitte, “2023 oil and gas industry outlook”, strong balance sheets and high energy demand have led to record levels of free cash flows for the upstream industry in the U.S.

Despite trade restrictions and macroeconomic uncertainty in the year ahead, O&G companies have been told they need to secure supply in the short term while transitioning to cleaner energy.

The strategies vary between groups and regions. Some U.S.-headquartered companies focus on production growth, and others invest in low-carbon businesses and technologies, like carbon capture and storage, renewable fuels, and hydrogen.

Carbon Capture Investments are Booming

Carbon capture will play a critical role in the energy transition, especially in heavy industries like power, steel, cement, and oil and gas.

Carbon capture and storage technology, which is becoming increasingly important in combating global warming, is being heavily invested in by the U.S. government, big tech companies, and venture capital firms.

Investing in clean energy projects is accelerated by the following factors, according to Deloitte's report:

Source: Deloitte, 2023 oil and gas industry outlook

Furthermore, The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management has announced $31 million in funding for 10 projects aimed at developing carbon capture technologies.

By 2050, the carbon removal market could be worth $1 trillion, according to VivaTechnology.

Do You Have a Proposal Creation Process that Can Handle the Growing Demand?

The number of RFPs will likely increase significantly as oil and gas activity grows and major investments are made in carbon capture operations.

Does your company's proposal team have the capacity to handle all the proposals you will need to send to win business? Will you need to hire extra people to get bids out on time?

If you're currently creating proposals with file-based solutions, you're likely dealing with these issues:

• Your proposal team spends more time hand-holding the processes than contributing value to a winning bid. Subject matter experts waste countless hours chasing email attachments, juggling printouts, and sifting through shared files instead of writing and communicating value, credibility and confidence.
• It takes a lot of work to keep track of content and control versions, especially when considering the number of contributors and technical complexity required.  Combining many different formats into one consistent, professional-looking document is time-consuming.
• Your organizational content is siloed, with key pieces of content scattered across multiple documents, systems, and locations. Subject matter experts spend more time searching for content than investing in personalizing content to improve accuracy and readability. 

The last-minute production sprint threatens the deadline…

Enter the Solution: XaitPorter

XaitPorter is the #1 document co-authoring and collaboration solution in the global oil and gas industry, because it eliminates the manual tasks that slow down the sales process and accelerates complex collaborative content milestones.

For oil and gas companies operating on the Norwegian Continental Shelf, XaitPorter has become the standard solution for heavy-duty document production. In fact, 100% of the APA 2022 operator licenses went to XaitPorter clients.

• Aker Carbon Capture, a dedicated carbon capture technology company and one of the few companies globally with extensive knowledge of the entire CCUS value chain, uses XaitPorter for tenders and proposals.
  
  
• Aker Energy, part of Aker Group, is playing a significant role in building up the Ghanaian oil and gas industry, and uses XaitPorter to produce their Field Development plan for a large project in Ghana.
  
  
• Aibel, one of the largest suppliers on the Norwegian continental shelf, uses XaitPorter to produce their complex documents, such as bids, proposals, and tenders.

Why Should You Use XaitPorter to Win More Business?

In the oil and gas and energy industries, XaitPorter has proven itself over the past 23 years as a trusted document co-authoring solution. Creating highly complex, high-value documents such as plans for development and operation of a petroleum deposit (PDOs), exploratory proposals, engineering contracts, licensing applications, environmental impact statements, risk assessments, and regulatory submissions can be a considerable challenge.

XaitPorter helps companies like yours create these complex documents faster, more efficiently, and with enterprise-level quality. Ultimately, XaitPorter will allow you to save time to focus on quality content, which is critical to project evaluations and awards in the oil and energy industry.

But don’t take our word for it. Take a look at what Shawn Le Maitre, Sales & Marketing Manager at Petroleum Technology Company (PTC), has to say about using XaitPorter:

– We save at least 50 percent, probably more, of the time we would normally have to spend on our proposals. I think I’ve literally done ten tenders in the last 12 months, and all of them are concurrent, some of them had deadlines that were within days of each other. I would never have been able to do that without using XaitPorter, unless I had hired probably two additional people to help me put the tenders together.

Read our case study: “PTC produced more consistent tenders in half the time using XaitPorter”

Sulmara Subsea is another of our clients in the energy and renewables sector. This is what Jeremy Steward, Commercial Manager at Sulmara, has to say:

“With XaitPorter, I saw the opportunity to streamline the multi-contributor, collaborative and iterative aspect of our bids, eliminate the bottlenecks and deliver higher quality proposals. Working with a smaller commercial team, we must be as efficient as possible to allow us to respond to multiple tenders at the same time. With XaitPorter, we can keep pace, expand, and help Sulmara grow.”

He goes on to say:

“The commercial process is based on approval levels which are based on a combination of risk, innovation, and overall monetary values of each project. For example, offshore weather is a factor and researching empirical weather information for any given region while attempting to remain competitive takes time. Since I’m not busy with Word and formatting, I can focus on the risks, budget, and pricing, and hammering these points home in the executive summary.”

This is only a small sample of the business value our clients receive from using XaitPorter. Time to value is within a week with this solution. You don't have to wait until the end of the year to see cost and time savings – XaitPorter can start giving you bang for your buck in the very same quarter as it is implemented.

Read more: How Proposal Software Helps Your Energy And Renewable Company

Don't Miss Out on the Opportunities 2023 Offers

As Jeremy Steward points out above, with XaitPorter, your team can spend more time focusing on the content and less time on mundane tasks like formatting and layout. You'll accelerate bid response and have the edge over your competition.

You never get a second chance to make an excellent first impression. With the click of a button, XaitPorter does just that with visually appealing layouts that increase your winning chances.

A high level of regulatory compliance is required for standardized processes. You can remain confident that your document will meet these requirements with the correct setup and implementation of XaitPorter.

Lastly, the policy-based document creation and workflow approval system is designed to dynamically build both standard and custom-configured documents based on predefined business rules, allowing key values to be changed and instantly updating documents and reports.

With XaitPorter, you don't have to spend days compiling the final document and paying a third party to do the layout; you just click print the night before the deadline and get a professional document consistent with branding guidelines.

The second part of this series will explore new investments and projects in the U.S. for 2023 and beyond. We’ll also look at how BP invests in the U.S., particularly in the Gulf of Mexico – one of the critical areas for the boom to come.

Why not sign up for a demo of XaitPorter? It's worth a try! You may like what you see, or you may decide to stay with manual formatting.