According to GlobalData, digital has been a buzzword in the oil and gas industry for some time. Digitisation involves adopting digital technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), cloud computing, cybersecurity, the Internet of Things (IoT), and robotics, among others.
The benefit of these technologies is that they can deliver actionable insights to extend the life of an existing oil and gas or energy asset and manage ageing infrastructure to help companies reduce their capital and operating expenditures.
Globally, Amazon Web Services (AWS) – a subsidiary of Amazon that provides on-demand cloud computing platforms and application programming interfaces – has been supporting the energy industry across the value chain through its digital assets.
In light of this, Oil & Gas Middle East sat down with Scott Sanderson, director of Global Business Development, Energy at AWS, to learn more about its energy systems of the future concept and why AWS is helping energy companies digitise.
“The energy system is a very physical asset,” says Sanderson. “But we are a digital company, and what our cloud technologies and solutions can do is try to make those physical assets more productive.”
“We understand that many physical assets in the energy sector are already deployed; however, we aim to ensure that our solutions help them meet their design criteria for optimum performance. We do this because they never quite meet these requirements in the real world, due to many reasons, including wear and tear, system corrosion, and other events.”
He says that data analytics helps AWS to bridge that gap back up to the original design criteria, and cloud technologies can be deployed to do that, which is the crux of its energy systems of the future concept.
Sustainability: a critical area of focus
AWS is helping to accelerate energy transition through practical innovations that deliver energy efficiently, reliably, sustainably, and responsibly. With the broadest energy partner ecosystem, AWS empowers energy leaders to “cloudify” their businesses to improve performance, accelerate innovation, transform the customer experience, maximise safety, and minimise their carbon footprint.
Sanderson adds: “Virtually, everything we do reduces the carbon footprint for our customers – for instance, taking an existing refinery and increasing the throughput without having to spend more capital, without having to spend more energy is, in effect, reducing the energy intensity for that customer.”
But how is AWS able to achieve this?
He cites Spanish multinational oil and gas company Cepsa as an example. Cepsa reduced its energy consumption by 2.5% while increasing its throughput and yield by virtue of using cloud technologies to analyse how best to structure the set points and feed that to the refineries.
According to Sanderson, that’s just one example of AWS being able to take the physical asset from its customers to make them more productive and have a lower carbon footprint.
Earlier this year, AWS partnered with ENI and Shell to deploy the OSDU Data Platform, which is essentially a cloud-native, open-source technology that provides the energy industry with a toolbox to address the undifferentiated capabilities needed to manage sizeable disconnected data sets.
Sanderson says subsurface data – particularly seismic data – are the most extensive data sets in the industry and critical to finding oil and producing oil and gas. “Our customers are telling us that they want to find ways to make subsurface decisions faster, and the OSDU platform allows this and more. With the platform, petro technical professionals can find this data and feed it into the applications used to model and find oil – but at a much faster pace to sustain that data lineage, data management, data governance and things of that nature.”
Summarising the conversation, he notes that the AWS is advocating for getting the data from the whole system – the different elements producing oil and gas in an oil field – together into a place where data scientists can analyse it and understand how it interacts and interchanges.
“Our production optimisation solution, introduced earlier this year, uses data and analytics to run numerous scenarios and simulations that help increase the production without spending CapEx on new wells,” Sanderson concludes.
