Digitalization is the Driver of Innovation
Digitalization is the driver of innovation in petroleum and renewables projects. As illustrated below, it can apply in three different areas of the company:
1) The integration of the company in its value chain or the so-called Extended or Connected Entreprise
2) The connection of products and services or internet of things (IoT) and internet of services (IoS)
3) The data value creation or development of new business models
In term of applications, these areas offer significant benefits for petroleum and renewable projects.
The integration of the value chain contributes to flawless project execution with collaborative design, engineering and construction. In this area, the first fields experiences report 20% time reduction. It also speeds up the commissioning and start up. In parallel, the digital twin reduces costs in eliminating the change orders.
Then, relying on cyber physical systems, the connected products and services helps in the assets management. These technologies reduce maintenance costs, they cut downtime and enable to build the digital process control loop. Here, the digitalized plants show 15% savings on operations expenses (Opex).
On the last point, a refinery generates 50,000 data per second representing 1 terabyte per day. This massive quantity of data contain as much potential of value creation and new business model.
As a consequence, the international oil companies (IOCs) concentrate 55% of their R&D budget on digital. Anyway, if the digitalization benefits are now well measured, some challenges still remain.
Digitalization Challenges
In the three areas mentioned above, the digitalization is the driver for innovation. It creates value as soon as some challenges are identified and resolved. In that respect this digital transition is no longer a technological issue, but a matter of process building trust and commitment.
Technology is no longer an issue since major steps were accomplished on the last years.
Firstly, international standards, mostly IEC and ISO, do exist for digitalization. Then, the Reference Architecture Model Industrie 4.0 (RAMI 4.0) is available to connect things and share data.
In this context, the solutions providers cover the market with new applications everyday. So much that we may consider that all the Industrie 4.0 technologies are today available.
Digital Technologies rely on Two Concepts
The digital technologies rely on two concepts, the Big Data and the Digital Twin, whereas the Big Data refers to all the processes and tools to capture, store and analyze the data. Like oil and gas resources, the data create value when extracted, treated and shared.
On its side, the Digital Twin is a virtual representation of a physical Object, Process or Service. It aggregates information all along the life cycle of the physical twin to visualize its status and to model its behavior.
These two concepts interact together in the way that Big Data technologies enable the implementation of the Digital Twin.
These Big Data technologies usually cover:
– Augmented / Virtual Reality
– Cloud / Edge Computing
– Big Data Infrastructure
– Artificial Intelligence
– Satellite / Radar Scanning
– 3D Printing
– 4G / 5G or LoRa or Wifi Connectivity
Once in place, these Big Data technologies help the development and operation of the Digital Twin. The deployment of this Digital Twin passes by the following steps:
– Data Capture
– Connectivity and Data Formatting
– Data Operating System
– Assest Digital Twin
– Process Digital Twin
– Augmented Operator
– HSSE
– Cybersecurity
Then, the implementation in practice of these two concepts may follow different approaches.
Top-Down or Bottom-up Approaches
Depending where you stand in the value chain of the process industry, you may chose between two different approaches of the digitalization, the Top-Down or the Bottom-up.
The Oil & Gas, Petrochemical and Renewables belong to the process industry running most of the time large and complex multi-billion dollars plants.
In that respect, the Top-Down approach is dedicated to the End Users and requires investments at the scale of these facilities. This Top-Down approach fits perfectly on new projects, especially in offshore or harsh environment. In these cases, Industrie 4.0 digital technologies can provide End Users with step change in Capex and Opex.
In opposite way, the Bottom-up approach may please all the players of the value chain from the bold manufacturers to the End User.
It begins with the digitalization of components or small equipment. Then, it escalates to machines, to the process and on last stage at the whole plant. This approach is easy to implement especially on existing facilities. There, it brings quick wins at small risks with great pedagogical value in organizations.
At the end, the purpose of the Top-Down and Bottom-up approaches is to build the digital process loop by one way or another.
The Digital Process Loop
The digitalization is not a target by itself, it is a mean to improve performances and save costs. In the picture below, we illustrate how to build the digital process loop in parallel to the usual process control system loop.
Compared with the existing conventional process control loop, the digital process loop provide End Users with three key major benefits. First, it offers far shorter response time, then it guides the operator straight to the root cause, finally it allows to model scenarios for resolution. These capabilities change the game in running large and complex operations.
In the diagram above, the idea is to capture most relevant data from the installed base. Then, after a first treatment the purpose is to produce passive data and captive data. The passive data are related to the components and the equipment while the active data translate the process status. The passive data helps to build the Digital Twin of the components and the equipment, then the combination of passive data and captive data contribute to build the Digital Twin of the process and the whole plant.
Anyway, collecting these data and treating them to build up the digital loop require multiple competences. Some of them belong to the End User, but most of them stand in its supply chain. Therefore, building up the digital process loop results from a collaborative process involving the key players of the value chain.
Digitalization creates Opportunities, Missing it exposes to Threats
As such, this collaborative process creates new opportunities to all the key players of the value chain. But missing it expose them to serious threats.
For all the key players of the value chain, the digitalization opens opportunities to:
– Turn your market captive on your data
– Develop additional expertise, create new services, refresh customer relationship
– Activate the collective intelligence of the supply chain to innovate and set competitive advantages
– Create new businesses with high added value.
In opposite way, missing today the digitalization opportunities may open door tomorrow to serious threats:
– Get evicted from market requirements
– Become obsolete
– Do not find available competent partners to go digital
– Open space for disruptive innovation.
As seen above all the technologies exist to build up the digital process loop in the Oil & Gas, Petrochemical and Renewables projects and existing facilities. After few years of experience, the process to implement them is now well-known.
So, digitalization is the driver of innovation, in the process industry it creates new markets, offers new opportunities for business development. In the projects database www.projectsmartexplorer.com you can find the evaluation of these opportunities per project, company, country or application.
In the meantime you can find more details in our online webinar about Digital Technologies for Petroleum and Renewable Projects
