Derek Middlemas, managing director, Digital Assets Projects, Aveva, still remembers the time when the oil and gas industry was miles away from realising the importance of process automation. It was the start of the millennium, the oil price averaged at just over $30 a barrel – not too different from today – and boosting profit, while lowering cost was a lot higher on boardroom agendas.
“The engineering to them was some sort of nasty stuff that went on in some back office,” he recalls. “But then the Texas City incident happened and all of a sudden operators were saying that they don’t want their people on the plant any more than they need to be to do a job.”
Middlemas refers to a massive explosion that took place at a BP refinery in 2005 which took the lives of 15 people and left many more injured. In the aftermath of the incident, companies and government bodies around the world took steps towards introducing new and much stricter health and safety rules.
“People were killed on the plant just because they happened to be on it.”
But this no longer needs to be the case. Thanks to modern engineering and product innovation, the physical presence of people on the plant is no longer required as much as before.
We now live in an era when remote control and instrumentation are becoming more and more mainstream, which in turn significantly reduces the need for human intervention.
“In a safety situation that can be quite critical. You can’t really put a dollar or a Return on Investment (RoI) on that but it’s more like an insurance policy where you are actually insuring that there is less chance of something going wrong,” Derek explained.
“You know what they say: ‘Mistakes don’t happen because operators do the wrong thing, mistakes happen because operators do the right thing with the wrong information.’”
To maintain your plant’s optimal performance, you need accurate, up to date data, which surprisingly enough can prove hard to source. Contrary to popular belief, one of the main challenges facing operators today is not the amount of data that machines store and collect, but the quality of this data and the way it’s being managed.
“If you are an operator and you are going to make a decision, you have to know that the data that you are making that decision on is accurate. If you look at a lot of cases where wrong decisions are made, it is because the available data is either incorrect or inconsistent,” said Middlemas.
Data accuracy and precision is without doubt of vital importance to ensuring smooth and optimum performance of the plant and the entire operations.
With automation in oil and gas expected to more than double over the next five years, engineering experts and producers alike spend billions of dollars every year on improving the quality of information generated from their assets.
“As one of the largest and most innovative technology providers in the world, Aveva boasts an extensive portfolio of data-driven software that enable its customers to adopt Aveva’s ground-breaking Digital Asset approach. One product in particular, Aveva Engage, allows our customers to truly interact with their digital assets and is poised to revolutionise collaborative decision making across capital projects and operating assets for the industry,” Middlemas said.
“It is all about effectively transforming the decision-making process that goes on in a plant: from various small singular things to larger aspects of planning plant shutdowns and executing them properly, to improving the ability of operators to act and make the right decisions with regard to any abnormal alarms in the plant.”
Improved planning during costly and time consuming plant shutdowns is another undeniable advantage that operators nowadays cannot afford to ignore.
“If you are planning a shutdown of the plant and a turnaround and provided that you’ve got all that engineering data if you can actually visualise the plant, then you can make better decisions, you can shorten the turnaround time. That’s not just about providing all the engineering data and technical information but doing it in a way that allows people to make the right decisions.” Brownfield projects are a major focus for Aveva at the moment due to the lack of readily available, up to date data information on older plants, Derek explains.
“Many of the new projects have a really good data. Whereas if you’ve got a refinery that’s been there for 20 years and you haven’t looked after its data, then you have a major problem. You have to reverse engineer the engineering data about the plant. So, that’s where very often you have to come in with a laser scan – you have to laser scan the whole plant in 3D and you have to rework the lines and P&IDs, etc. That’s a big challenge for people in brownfield projects. There are very few plants in the world that can put their hand on their heart and say they’ve got up to date critical data on their plant.”
“We aim (with our technology) to filter out, or to provide our customers with the ability to filter out, all [the data] and only bring together what they need to support specific decision making process; and make sure the information is easy and accessible for all departments,” he explains.
In process automation, big data and data analytics will remain major trends in 2016. According to Wikibon, the total big data market reached $11.59bn in 2012, ahead of their 2011 forecast. It reached $18.1bn in 2013, an annual growth of 61%, which puts it on pace to exceed $47bn by 2017.
“The latest trends that we see have to do with big data, and how we transform data into meaningful information. Remote collaboration is a big trend which we see people apply, i.e. making sure they can operate their assets remotely,” said Yiannis Bessiris, regional business leader, Advanced Solutions, Honeywell Process Solutions.
“Another trend that’s definitely coming very strong to the oil and gas market is the Internet of Things (IoT),” he added.
According to Bessiris, the focus will be on understanding how different assets “communicate” with each other and how to get more information from existing assets in order to enhance their performance.
“Nowadays it is very easy to get hundreds of gigabytes of data sitting somewhere in a hard disk but how do you make sense of that data? We have a very strong technology offering which definitely makes the collection of data much easier. When you couple this with our OTC capability, you can connect with any kind of application or solution in an industrial arena.
“On top of this, we have a specific department that addresses the challenge of providing functionalities and solutions to customers to make sense of the data. For asset management, we give you all the tools and analytics that would try to predict and tell you what’s happening in the plant.
“As you go higher in the application, we have key performance indicators, KPI solutions, where you consolidate your data into KPIs which are very easy to monitor all the way to the senior level.”
This said, it is important to recognise the complexity of big data in industrial operations. As Jeff Immelt, chairman and CEO, GE, recently pointed out: “industrial data is not only big, it’s the most critical and complex type of big data.”
“Our greatest challenge and opportunity is to manage and analyse this data in a highly secure way to deliver better outcomes for customers and society. We are developing more predictive solutions and equipping our products with sensors that constantly measure performance so our customers see major productivity gains and minimise no unplanned downtime. Observing, predicting and changing this performance is how the Industrial Internet will help airlines, railroads and power plants operate at peak efficiency,” Immelt added.
Gol Airlines, one of GE customers, predicts it will see $90mn in savings over the next five years by using software to better track and adapt its flight routes and fuel consumption.
“[Automation can] minimise the need to have people in the field. You can do a lot more things remotely. And though I don’t think we can completely remove people from the field, we can equip them better to keep them safe,” Bisseris concluded.
