How extended reality can bolster training for oil and gas

Posted: December 08, 2025

There’s a fire on the rig: What do you do? How fast can you respond? Is your entire crew on the same page—and was everybody paying attention when you learned the procedure?

The hazards of oil and gas production are well known. Man overboard, gas leak, well blowout, fire: Personnel must be trained for these situations and inculcated with a safety-first culture. Training can be a challenge for energy firms more broadly, particularly when it comes to preparing workers for remote environments such as offshore oil rigs and platforms—and for doing so in unpredictable conditions. To do things right, an operator needs every advantage it can get.

Over the last few years, oil and gas companies have been investing in training solutions based on extended reality (XR), i.e., virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR). Using just a headset and controllers, firms can now give their workers a tour of a facility, train them in regular procedures and run tests regarding various elements of hazard detection and emergency response, while also exposing the team to the sights and sounds (and timings) of their future work environment.

What VR offers for training both onshore and offshore

Oil and gas production is innately high-risk. Almost always, operators have to manage some combination of extreme weather, geographic remoteness and logistical complexity. Workers handle unstable hydrocarbons and operate specialized heavy machinery in challenging locations. Personnel require targeted training to be able to work—and respond to emergencies—in such environments at the appropriate level of risk awareness.

If such training is indeed more effective when it is more intense, interactive and realistic, then it stands to reason that VR and AR have something major to contribute. Most immediately, these technologies allow workers to be trained without traveling to the facilities in question, thus saving on transportation costs as well as climate footprint. These technologies also ameliorate the safety risks involved in replicating emergency-like conditions for workers to train on, risks that are even greater in the offshore context. Providers of extended reality training solutions can enable onboarding through virtual site introductions as well as VR training directly targeted toward major risks such as leaks, fires, electrical hazards, tripping or falling, and issues related to work in confined spaces.

Research suggests that XR—as compared with traditional training methods like PowerPoint presentations and in-person demonstrations—offers benefits by placing the training within realistic digital environments while also creating higher levels of emotional engagement. In the context of offshore facilities, the PwC Energy Experience Center in Norway has pointed to advantages including a “real-feel” user experience and early quality testing of offshore environments in addition to safety benefits from onshore dry runs and time savings when, for instance, offering subcontractors offshore awareness training using VR in advance of their travel to the site.

Extended reality training is already spreading

A recent study from GlobalData found that major energy firms like Shell and ExxonMobil are already using VR in training for both onshore and offshore environments, reaping cost and safety advantages for new facilities. Immersive training programs allow workers to develop their knowledge and skills while remaining in a safe environment, for instance, by using virtual walk-throughs of a site’s various workflows.

Shell makes extensive use of VR for training and simulation-based learning, including in emergency response programs that allow for quasi-hands-on experiences of hazardous conditions that would be difficult or dangerous to reproduce in real life, including offshore platforms. As Steven Wrobleski, Shell’s Regional HSSE Manager for the Americas, put it: “We are not going to put people in harm's way in order to train, but in the virtual world, you can do that, right? And that's really part of the power.”

Shell’s VR emergency response program aims to guarantee the scientific accuracy of its training simulations by using outputs from the company’s gas and fire dispersion modeling tool. Frontline staff are trained on the digital twin of the asset they work on.

DNV, meanwhile, has developed a VR tool enabling remote training for its major accident hazard (MAH) program. Users are given hand controllers and a VR headset, including headphones and cameras, then invited to walk through a simulated environment that presents a range of relevant scenarios, combining typical operational tasks with simulated accidents and failures. This immersive approach allows users to experience full-scale fire and explosion tests, viewing the sorts of challenges they might experience onsite without having to travel to an offshore environment—or even to DNV’s Spadeadam Research and Development Facility, where such demonstrations are otherwise made.

“The VR doesn’t quite look like offshore, but it definitely doesn’t look like a CAD model with shiny red bits and bits of green structure or whatever else that you’ve got. It looks more like an offshore environment, really making you think you are offshore,” said John Morgan, senior principal for energy systems at DNV.

Morgan also suggested that the dynamism of the immersive virtual experience—which demands that users react on the same timescale as real life—can lead trainees to better recall what they have learned. The intensity is the point. “You’ll go through a whole career and never see anything remotely like a major hazard,” Morgan said, and so “complacency can set in.”

How AR could support on-site oil and gas training

So far, it is primarily VR driving the widespread adoption of extended reality in oil and gas training programs. Further opportunities may be realized, however, in the development of AR technologies—which overlay digital information onto real-world environments as opposed to creating digital simulations as with VR.

Among other things, AR can create “in-situ” training for technicians who are able to access operating procedures and service instructions through their AR device. Integration of AR training with digital twins may prove advantageous. Obstacles still remain, such as the provision of required network bandwidth in remote locations. Yet a world where offshore workers can receive training and instructions from remote experts via AR-enabled wearables may be edging ever closer to our very own reality.