Digital twins in the Oil & Gas industry
by
Damodar Mangalwedhe
for
Acuvate
Recommended by
Paul Shale
Chief Commercial Officer
The article introduces the complex cost and need for asset and visibility in oil & gas operations before introducing the idea of preventative maintenance and digital twins.
The article very briefly outlines seven use case studies.
- Oil field monitoring and predictive maintenance
- Modeling real-life drilling scenarios to determine equipment feasibility
- Conducting dynamic simulations to arrive at optimal production workflows
- Optimization of production through digital twins
- Data integration for intelligent asset management
- Maintaining tacit enterprise knowledge using digital twins
- Increased workplace safety
Like many articles on digital twin benefits, the opinion concludes with non-quantified ROI benefits.
The use cases of digital twins in the oil and gas industry offer several benefits as follows:
- Increased yield
- Reduced unplanned downtime
- Improve workforce efficiency
- Real-time monitoring
- Improved decision-making
- Discover additional avenues for profit-making and uplift
Why it’s relevant to Nextspace
Despite its brevity this article is interesting for Nextspace as a quick checklist of potential goals to select as your early MVP wins.
Therefore, some points to note:
- Predictive maintenance. Requires on-field performance and operational condition data, as well as analytics to establish parameters and identify deviations.
- Real-life drills. Imagined in the article as requiring augmentation (AR / VR) but can be done with mobile alerts or other system integrations.
- Dynamic simulations. Requires process digitization, workflow analysis and data simulations and analytics.
- Optimizing production. Requires five step process requiring organizational buy-in and data maturity.
- Intelligent asset management. Requires integration of internal and external systems and data, real-time data flow in the digital twin and the ability to conduct “what-if” scenarios.
- Tacit (or institutional) knowledge. Requires access to and buy-in from system experts.
- Workplace safety. Requires new hardware such as IoT wearables and cameras.
Digital twins are a journey.
You cannot achieve all use cases at once so each journey must be structured according to the specific customer’s business objectives, issues and context.
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By
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for
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The value of Digital Twins can only be realized if Digital Twins and their virtual environment contain the same data and resulting information as their corresponding Physical Twins and real-world environment. This means that the need for more extensive, faster, and richer sensing of the physical world will dramatically increase as valuable use cases proliferate. In addition, we will evolve from working in physical or virtual environments to integrating and working simultaneously in both environments. Dr. Grieves discusses his views on the opportunities and issues of this evolution.
