“The East of England has huge scope for engineers of the future to embrace low carbon opportunities”

Tim Atkin (35), grew up in Northamptonshire but now lives in Oslo, where he works for the Software arm of the multi-disciplinary engineering consultancy AGR, helping develop tools to aid digitalisation and supporting energy companies reach low carbon goals.

I’ve worked both onshore and offshore during my career, with the latter taking me around the world to places ranging from Greenland to Angola. Today I’m based in Oslo, Norway, where I work at AGR Software, as a product owner of the company’s iQx™ platform – software to digitise the well delivery process.

I grew up in Northamptonshire and, coming from a rugby-playing area of the country, naturally this was a major focus of mine growing up. I studied Geology at Kingston University, graduating in 2009 when the country was recovering from the recession. At the time, the oil price had remained high so luckily there were plenty of jobs in the oil industry, and I entered the workforce through a company called Geolog working as a ‘mudlogger’. This primarily involved creating detailed records of boreholes being drilled offshore.

For the next seven years I worked as a geologist, before going back to education to complete a master’s in petroleum engineering at Montanuniverståt in Leoben, Austria. After this I moved gradually in the direction of software development, starting at TDE in Austria and eventually moving to Norway to work for AGR Software in 2019.

Day to day, I help develop the software that can then be applied for both the oil and gas market and the geothermal industry. My role is to keep our software relevant and up to date so that it can be used effectively to aid the digitalisation plans of large oil companies and help move towards cleaner forms of energy. At the moment I’m working on a project I’m particularly proud of: an emission estimation tool that can be used for projects both within and outside of the energy industry. Organisations are increasingly looking to predict and estimate their carbon emissions across their operations and are keen to know how they can be mitigated against or avoided.

I believe that the oil and gas industry can play a role in helping achieve the goals set out as part of the energy transition by taking their experiences build over the last few decades, and applying it to the growing renewable sector. Where I’m from in the East of England there’s huge scope for engineers of the future to embrace and learn from low carbon opportunities including carbon capture and storage (CCS), wind and geothermal projects. The world will always need energy, but the ways we produce it are changing – for the better.