Businesses operating in the oil and gas sector around the world have been urged to embrace emerging technology, particularly in the digital sphere.
Energy Voice reported on the comments made by BP’s global head of upstream technology Ahmed Hashmi, who was speaking at the three-day ENGenious Symposium in Aberdeen this week.
This is the first year that the event has been held, and it’s been organised by the Society of Petroleum Engineers. The focus of the three-day symposium is automation and control systems, data analytics, robotics and smart communications.
In his address at the opening ceremony, Mr Hashmi said: “This is the time for us to find that next higher productive gear for our industry and digital has a lot to offer in that space.”
Khalid Al-Buraik, a vice-president at Saudi Aramco and one of the keynote speakers, agreed that now is the time to embrace new technology, commenting that the industry is “on the threshold of a technology revolution”.
He noted that this event is taking place as the oil and gas sector experiences what he described as a “tentative recovery” from a downturn.
“The key to addressing our challenges has always been the timely development of new technologies,” Mr Al-Buraik stated.
These comments all come as BP announced that it has deployed a new cloud-based advanced analytics solution across a number of its platforms. Plant Operations Advisor (POA), which has been developed with GE company Baker Hughes (BHGE), is now being used across all four of the firm’s deep-water platforms in the Gulf of Mexico.
The system has been designed to reduce unplanned downtime across BP’s platforms, and following its success in the Gulf of Mexico the intention is to deploy it across more than 30 of the company’s upstream assets around the world.
Mr Hashmi commented: “We expect the deployment of this technology not only to deliver improvements in safety, reliability and performance of our assets, but also to help raise the bar for the entire oil and gas industry.”
Thousands of mission-critical pieces of equipment are monitored by the POA system, which analyses millions of data points every day and provides real-time insights on performance and maintenance.
It allows engineers to address any performance or operational issues with equipment or processes before they become significant problems with the potential to shutdown production.
BHGE has also recently won a large contract to deliver integrated services at Saudi Aramco’s Marjan oilfield, Compelo recently reported. Under the contract, BHGE will provide drilling services, coiled tubing services and drilling fluids engineering services.
It’s hoped that the work BHGE carries out will increase the capacity at the Marjan oilfield. The company is due to start work in September.
Chairman, president and CEO at BHGE Lorenzo Simonelli said that the expansion in the Marjan field “requires proven and efficient technology, matched by digital competencies that BHGE can deliver”.
There could be growing demand for oil and gas engineering services around the world as technology improves and the main oil and gas businesses look at ways to improve their efficiency and the volume of oil or gas they’re able to produce.