Industry executives say such innovations are long overdue.

“The problem of the industry is not the oil price — it is the efficiency of the industry,” said John Pearson, president for northern Europe at Amec Foster Wheeler, which provides services like platform operations and maintenance for energy companies. “It didn’t work at $100 a barrel,” Mr. Pearson said, so it is even more critical at today’s prices.

Chevron says the operations center, staffed most days by about two dozen people, enables the company to identify problems and intervene before having to take the costly step of temporarily shutting down production. An 18-year-old platform called Captain, for example, ran for 125 days without having to curtail production for maintenance, about four times as long as usual.

The wells in the Captain field extract not only oil but also a lot of water — which creates an emulsion that can interfere with the well’s pump over time, slowing production. But with the operations center, technical engineers onshore can detect such problems early and alert the team on the platform to open the pump further or change the settings. Chevron credits this capability for enabling a new well in the Captain field to produce 3,000 more barrels a day than initially planned.

As a result of these new efficiencies, Chevron said it saved $31 million in the center’s first eight months.

During the heady period from 2011 to mid-2014 — when prices of the North Sea benchmark oil, Brent crude, averaged more than $100 a barrel — industry executives were willing to spend lavishly to make sure their projects took priority. There were bidding wars for skilled labor. And the owners of equipment like drilling rigs and supply boats were able to demand premium rates for their services.

Now, with costs and revenue so far out of sync, the situation is particularly dire in the North Sea because production has declined more than 50 percent over the last decade, to about 1.4 million barrels a day.

Image Chevron's $3 million integrated operations center in Aberdeen. Credit... Andrew Testa for The New York Times

“The issue in the North Sea is existential around the cash cost of operation at the current level of oil prices,” Simon Henry, Royal Dutch Shell’s chief financial officer, said recently while discussing the company’s quarterly results.