The dependence of this oil and gas (O&G) business on automation has increased in the past ten years, which is expected farther to double by 2020. As a result of project cancellation followed by the fall in crude oil prices from 2014 to 2016, multiple rounds of industry layoffs were declared that left O&G companies with reduced number of trained workers. This raised the dependence of oil firms on automation so as to complete processes without any delay. Initiatives to digitize oil fields have been implemented, and this has contributed to investing in instrumentation in order to increase productivity and complete projects within defined budgets and timelines. These initiatives are found to be quite beneficial, especially in offshore rigs, to gathering production information in a timely manner. However, the present industry challenge isn’t the inaccessibility of data, but rather how to create the large volume of gathered data more successful. In reaction to this challenge, the automation sector has developed from supplying hardware gear with aftermarket solutions to becoming more service-based and supplying software tools which may translate into huge volumes of information into meaningful, smart information which may be leveraged to make important business decisions.
Worker and environment safety in oil fields needs to be given utmost priority since it deals with dangerous operations in distant locations. One approach to ensure safety is to install security systems at field locations that can detect unexpected events even before they happen by assessing the pattern from historical data collected. The tendency of selling human control systems–such as a distributed control system (DCS), supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA), safety instrumented system (SIS), manufacturing execution system (MES), and also industrial asset management (IAM)–has shifted since demand for an integrated system with multiple functionalities has found to increase. All these IoT platforms eliminate the need for employees to visit hazardous places for regular monitoring functions by allowing remote monitoring capabilities. These programs may join every system in every plant at every location, which improves the plant operations visibility to the service suppliers, clients, and plant supervisors are responsible for decision making. Together with IoT platforms, customers are provided with the choice to choose the required services as per their specific needs.
Although there are many proven advantages of IoT services, they have limits which are in the process of being addressed. The main challenge has to do with information protection. Data accumulated from plants is extremely important and has to be protected. Only authorized people ought to be able to access to the information, since the modification of information by hackers could directly alter the decision-making and strategic planning process.
Major automation companies have emerged with their particular IoT platforms to assist customers embark on their travel to digitize petroleum areas, including ABB’s Ability, Honeywell’s Sentience, Siemens’s MindSphere, GE’s Predix, and Schneider Electric’s EcoStruxture. All these IoT platforms are individually explained below, as each provides a specialized IoT service.
ABB’s Skill was launched in 2017 to enhance customer value by providing dynamic solutions and services through the latest digital technologies. Ability consists of 70,000 management systems and 70 million connected devices. The major solution provided by ABB’s Ability system is to monitor the performance of asset-intensive businesses, control systems utilized by process businesses, remote monitoring equipment, and offshore rigs. The following generation of Ability is working towards creating a partnership with Microsoft’s Azure in order to integrate with its own cloud services. ABB is turning industrial-centric company into applications service-based business that can assist its clients access the electronic world. Customers have discovered that by employing the digital capabilities of Ability, they were able to attain improvements in operational performance and efficacy. By further adding cloud solutions, ABB firmly believes that it is going to help clients that are beginning to embark on digital transformation assess, Boost, collaborate crops, and automate their endeavors.
Honeywell’s Sentience was started with a new cloud service called Uniformance Cloud Historian at 2018. Employing the cloud services, it’s likely to make a data lake by integrating data from production, enterprise resource planning (ERP), and other business units so as to perform analytical operations. Insights from one plant can be shared with all other plants, and this will allow smarter, more strategic choices to be made with more valuable data presented. It has benefitted the customers by allowing them to complete projects in a few hours that would traditionally take months or weeks. The data pool created includes historic data points which allow data analysts to discover unknown tendencies that may lead to making wrong conclusions.
Siemens’s MindSphere is just another cloud-based IoT platform and was launched in 2018. It’s an open operating system with the ability to join radio frequency identification (RFID) transponders to MindSphere. Collecting and analyzing the data gathered could be complicated and expensive, but with the help of MindSphere, machineryplants, and control systems (irrespective of the seller ) from various locations can be linked using Siemens’s software and hardware resources. Challenges associated with cybersecurity are addressed by only providing access to authorized people, and those have the ability to access it from any remote site. The largest benefit of MindSphere is that the flexibility that it offers to clients. By way of example, customers can us it to access applications supplied by Siemens in addition to applications offered by other IT providers. For instance, Ruggedcom is a communication technologies used mainly in harsh and rugged environments, and information from this can be moved to MindSphere by means of a gateway such as MindConnect Nano or even Ruggedcom RX1400.
GE’s Predix with IoT cloud service platform has been launched in 2016. GE utilizes its Predix cloud to save data that is accumulated, and this paves the way for organizations to become digitized. Predix provides tools for advantage connectivity, security, and compliance based on the O&G industry. The Predix cloud is able to store, analyze, and manage the gathered data in real time. Since the cloud is an interoperable layer, it can gather data from many sources and perform analysis on the normalized data.
Schneider Electric’s EcoStruxture was launched in 2016. In addition to this digitization of electricity management and automation, the latest edition of EcoStruxture helps clients connect to their own assets with edge controller and supplies them with a cloud-based analytical service. This platform also provides exploration and production (E&P) transparency. Using its data analytics capability, it’s possible to match history data with real time data to perform more accurate simulations of planned operations. Asset performance could be enhanced by making better decisions using a suitable grasp of the data set. Using this historical data and predictive analytics, versions can be created to help avoid unsafe operations. Besides Schneider Electric being a global energy management and automation operation specialist, it may now provide added capacities of Big Data analytics through EcoStruxture.
Conclusion
The automation marketplace has evolved with the changing demands of the customers, from providing individual control gear to integrated management systems with multi-functionality capacities. Since 2014, several O&G companies are have been cooperating with solution providers to understand how IoT technology can help them thrive at a low-price oil environment as well as using advanced management methods. Leading automation vendors have established their own IoT platforms, which focus on providing services like cloud services, predictive analytics, remote monitoring, Big Data analytics, and cybersecurity, which can be of overriding importance in this industry. Increased productivity, reduced operational and maintenance costs, increased profitability, increased efficiency, and enhanced plant optimization would be the usual benefits realized by clients who use IoT platforms for their plant operations. Even though the end goal of customers might be similar throughout this competitive environment, this doesn’t mean they all need the same software services. The services offered by major automation vendors give customers the flexibility and choices when selecting the best platform for their objectives.
