Darrell Knight, Senior Vice President for Global Accounts, & Thornton Brewer, Client Relations and Strategic Partnerships at FutureOn, explore the high-yield impact the implementation of the digital field twin will have on the oil and gas field’s design, operation, and decommissioning work-flow.
Digitalisation is a hot topic in the oil and gas industry these days. Much of the discussion revolves around various emerging technologies. However, the fundamental challenge over the next 20 years is data and how to access
and use it in a smart way.
To overcome this challenge, the oil and gas industry must successfully adopt the principles set out in other industries commonly known as Industry 4.0.
This means digitizing, integrating, and utilizing the legacy data and Big Data currently laying fallow in databases and trapped in expert systems. Capturing and normalizing this data across the entire organization means implementing digital, cloud-based, software strategies across the entire value chain.
FutureOn’s product development team recognized the value that immediate digitalisation opportunities create for oil and gas companies and developed FieldTwin as a solution to a global problem.
FieldTwin addresses the problems that oil and gas companies face in accessing data, converting data across expert systems, and visualizing data. As a result, our customers are seeing quantitative improvements that increase risk management, improve workers efficiency, and speed up project completions.
Long-term viability
Traditional digitalisation approaches can threaten oil and gas companies’ long-term viability as they involve significant upfront CAPEX expenditures.
Deploying IoT devices, smart sensors, and robotic tools require expensive new equipment investments, employee training, and retrofitting of existing systems. Such investment may sound compelling but the ROI on such investment is difficult to assess.
A more efficient and immediate digitalisation strategy, however, is the investment in instantly implementable data-driven solutions which improve work processes, increase data accessibility, and usability.
Critically, these solutions drive benefits such as creating a single source of truth for projects and the promotion of inter- and outer-company collaboration, resulting in accelerated project completion times.
Historically, upstream personnel – both in the office and in the field – have struggled to efficiently gather offshore data and effectively analyse it to make better business decisions. One internal audit conducted by an oil and gas company found its upstream employees spent up to 80 percent of their time simple searching for the data they need to drive those decisions.
FutureOn is preeminent in the development of the digital field twin; FieldTwin is currently deployed operationally in real-world fields and early reports show that FieldTwin reduces pre-FEED field planning time and investment by at least 60%.
Unified field planning
Operators and EPC companies need a and management platform which makes managing projects and handing projects off from one phase of development to another seamless.
Across the entire life-cycle of a field, FieldTwin creates and maintains a digital twin – an exact digital copy of an oil and gas company’s physical assets – which enables producers to maximize asset performance and value.
FieldTwin drives collaboration to support internal teams’ ability to work more productively and intelligently with each other and with subcontractors.
Imagine a pre-FEED firm digitally designing and optimizing wellplacements, field layouts, and early-stage installation schedules. The digital product is handed off to the engineering firm responsible for the FEED stage of that field’s development – all in a matter of weeks, as opposed to months or longer. This is what FieldTwin is achieving today.
This same process would repeat again after the engineering is complete and installation begins.
The digital FieldTwin would be a single source of truth for all parties involved, creating accuracy, reducing delays, and managing risks. Once the operator had taken responsibility for the field, the FieldTwin would integrate IoT sensor data for real-time monitoring of equipment statuses, well flowrates, production values, vessel locations, and engineer tasks…all in real time.
At an operations level FieldTwin makes it possible for engineers to receive, manage, and interpret the vast data flow created by IoT sensors. Connecting those previously unmanageable data streams with FieldTwin offers a visual representation of equipment data.
Now, through FieldTwin, critical operation data is visually represented on specific assets as warnings or notifications when set parameters are exceeded. Our customers ate creating safer and more responsive operating conditions, lowering risks, and better preserving the longevity and integrity of field equipment. Additionally, offshore asset inspection, maintenance and repair programs become more effective as access to more robust information informs priorities, timing, and the expertise needed in planned maintenance.
Moreover, historical information about each piece of equipment within the digital field twin can be stored in a digital data-lake associated with that piece of equipment. From first concept to decommissioning, engineers at any stage are able to see all documentation and equipment specifications associated with that individual piece of equipment. This increases operational certainty, improves maintenance, and reduces costs.
FieldTwin makes data more secure by being a Cloud-based platform. The comprehensive security measures developed by Google, Microsoft and Amazon, are unbeatable. Operating within the secure Cloud also makes it easier to integrate data and break up the barriers built by legacy systems which impede data usage. A digital field twin enables data accessibility and supports innovative ways to exploit this data, i.e. smarter drilling, greater field automation, and improved safety.
Embedded as an interactive object within any web-based operational dashboard, FieldTwin allows user access globally via any device. User- and context-sensitive dashboards can be easily configured. Intrinsically smart, FieldTwin can connect any aspect of the virtual field to workflows to speed and improve operational decision making.
The FieldTwin solution aligns with top priorities oil and gas companies have recently set for their data and digitization investment strategies: to improve data utilization and advanced visualization.
FutureOn’s FieldTwin gives operators the power to make data driven decision in less time and increase efficiency and boost performance. FieldTwin leverages the power of a single source of truth represented by a true digital twin of the field.
The FieldTwin is the future of the digital oil and gas field: are you readyto step into the Future?
