In the most recent episode of the Satellite World Briefing, we spoke with Maarten Verhaegh, who leads the Energy and Resources Practice at SES, about how satellite connectivity is transforming modern oil and gas operations. Reliable connectivity is crucial for maintaining operational continuity, enhancing worker safety, and enabling real-time decision-making in some of the world’s most challenging environments as operators continue to digitize remote assets, expand the use of connected devices, and adopt AI-driven technologies.
Verhaegh discussed the importance of why connectivity should be viewed as critical operational infrastructure rather than just a communications service. He also discussed how edge computing is reshaping how organizations manage growing volumes of data, how multi-orbit satellite architectures support diverse operational requirements, and how reliable connectivity is enhancing resilience, sustainability, and operational efficiency across the energy sector.
Satellite World Briefing (SWB): As oil and gas operations become increasingly digital, how has connectivity evolved from a supporting technology to a core operational requirement?
Maarten Verhaegh (MV): I push back on the word “shifted” because it sounds gentle. What has really happened is that industry has automated itself into a corner. The moment you start running an asset from a thousand kilometers away, the link stops being communications and becomes the control plane. You’ve made connectivity load-bearing, whether you admit it or not.
Too many operators are still running fully digital assets on contracts written as if it were 2010, with “best effort” service and no meaningful SLA. I’ll be blunt: if your link is best effort, then your operation is best effort. You can’t run autonomous processes over a network that’s only probably there.
SWB: Oil and gas environments range from offshore platforms to remote pipelines. How does SES use different technologies to solve the unique connectivity challenges of each?
MV: There’s an assumption that one constellation solves everything, usually whichever one happens to be the loudest in that quarter. That’s lazy engineering.
A pipeline sensor sending a few kilobytes a day or a drilling platform streaming real-time data are solving completely different problems. For mission-critical sites like rigs and FPSOs, we advocate for MEO because it delivers fiber-like, deterministic performance. The latency you see at 2 a.m. is the same latency you get at 2 p.m. It’s predictable.
For wide-area IoT, our GEO provides cost-effective coverage across entire regions. LEO also has an important role at the edge, especially when combined with private 5G and edge computing.
SWB: Security and resilience remain top priorities in this industry. What does it take to deliver mission-critical connectivity?
MV: Mission-critical is probably one of the most abused phrases in this industry. Everybody claims it. Almost nobody specs for it.
To me, mission-critical means the network behaves the same on its worst day as it does on its best day. Not the fastest, but the most predictable. A control system doesn’t care whether you can hit a gigabit on a good afternoon. It cares whether latency suddenly jumps from 114 milliseconds because a satellite dropped below the horizon. That might be invisible during a video call, but it’s unacceptable for a SCADA connection.
It comes down to three things: deterministic latency backed by SLAs, genuinely diverse redundancy, and security built specifically for operational technology, not simply borrowed from IT. Resilience isn’t a feature you add at the end. It’s an architectural decision you choose from the start.
SWB: With the number of connected devices doubling by 2028, how is satellite connectivity keeping up with the massive surge in data from remote sites?
MV: Berg Insight projects the connected device base growing from roughly seven to eight million devices in 2023 to around 18 to 19 million by 2028. What we’re actually seeing is something close to a tripling, bringing us closer to 25 to 30 million devices.
Usually, the instinct is to say, “We need a bigger pipe.” That’s the wrong instinct. If you’re planning for 80 million devices by backhauling everything over satellite, you’ve already lost. You’ll never afford it, and you’ll simply drown in noise.
The answer isn’t moving more data. It’s moving the intelligence. Instead of sending everything to the cloud, you move the intelligence to the edge, process the data where it’s created, and only send what actually matters: the exceptions, the alarms, and the actionable events.
Satellite’s job isn’t to be a dumb pipe. It’s to be the deterministic backbone carrying the signals that survive edge processing.
SWB: How are organizations balancing cloud-based analytics versus edge computing in the field, and what are the trade-offs they’re having to make?
MV: One key thing to call out is the paradox of bringing the data to the intelligence or bringing the intelligence to the data. So, all the data is generated on the edge. You either use the satellite to take the data and support it to the cloud, and then do your computation science, analytics, and draw your conclusions there. Or you turn it around: you take your AI, the analytics capability, and deploy it on an edge compute capability, and run it then and there in the field.
That’s the paradox. What do you do? Do you use your satellite capacity to backhaul data, or do you use it as a control plane in the whole setup? It’s what corporate policy dictates, and that’s where an element of sovereignty comes into play.
If you talk to oil and gas companies in the Middle East, they will not allow you to take their data anywhere else but within their country. So, what comes up, comes down in the same geography. If you talk to explorers, they don’t care; the data is more valuable, they want to get the data somewhere so they can start processing.
If you have a geological survey company, they generate terabytes, petabytes of data, and need to have that computed very quickly. Because if they can’t, they run the risk of coming to shore, doing the computation, and then figuring out they were two degrees off. They’d have to go back, sail all the way back, and restart the recording. Whilst if they could have computed it on the spot, the captain could have just turned around and done another sweep at almost zero additional cost. That’s a scenario where satellite capacity really makes you different.
SWB: How is satellite technology improving worker well-being and safety for crews on long rotations?
MV: A happy worker is a happy employee, and a happy worker is one that can connect with the home front, exchange thoughts with loved ones, and still be part of family life, even though they’re quite some miles away. That increases the safety on board of these types of vessels.
The connectivity, if something goes wrong, will also support things like telemedicine, like a worker getting injured. People on board will be able to deliver the first treatment, and you’ll be able to call out for a helicopter to come. The connectivity here is in support of crew well-being, not only on a day-to-day basis, but it also acts as a lifeline. It needs to be there. Connectivity isn’t a perk that you get for granted. Without the connectivity, oil and gas companies will not be able to get their employees out to the field.
SWB: Looking ahead, how do you see satellite connectivity helping the industry as it moves towards more sustainable operations?
MV: Because sustainability attracts a lot of attention, the honest contribution of connectivity isn’t a glossy ESG slide, it’s a measurement you can’t mess up. You can’t decarbonize what you can’t measure, and far too much emission reporting is still estimated and unverifiable.
Real-time monitoring changes that: continuous methane detection, flaring measured, not modeled. That data is auditable because it’s live.
And then there’s the operational side. Every autonomous inspection that replaces a helicopter flight, every asset run to burn less, results in less emissions. The operators who win in the transition won’t have the best sustainability narrative; they’ll be the ones whose data is good enough that they don’t need one.
SWB: Any final thoughts you would like to share?
MV: It’s become clear that only when you have the conversation about what matters do people start to really understand what’s possible. I welcome your thoughts; I welcome your ideas. I’d love to interact with the market and understand how we can help you with your business. I’m always willing to have a conversation, always happy to engage.
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