**London**: Oil and gas industry leaders like BP, Chevron, and Shell are leveraging digital twins to optimise operations and enhance decision-making. With the technology evolving rapidly, firms are witnessing significant reductions in meeting times and labour costs while transforming workflows and corporate strategies.
Oil and gas companies are increasingly embracing advanced technology in the form of digital twins, a virtual representation that enables them to optimise operations, streamline decision-making, and enhance overall efficiency. Industry leaders including BP, Chevron, and Shell have expanded their use of this technology, which saw significant interest starting in the early 2010s, as highlighted by Miguel Valdez, vice president of growth at Kongsberg Digital. He stated, “The combined annual growth rate for digital twins is 39 [%], 40%,” signifying rapid market expansion driven by both customer investments and technological developments.
Digital twins amalgamate vast amounts of data from various sources across an enterprise, facilitating improved remote monitoring and faster communication. The technology has revolutionised workflow management within companies, allowing routine tasks that previously consumed hours or days to be completed in mere minutes. Valdez noted that one Kongsberg Digital client managed to reduce a daily meeting of 30 to 40 individuals from an hour to just 15 minutes. “You’re optimizing how you’re planning and executing work,” Valdez explained, further emphasising the financial benefits tied to time and resource efficiencies.
Kongsberg Digital has introduced its Kognitwin platform, which provides 2D and 3D virtual representations of industrial assets and facilities. As advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning continue to shape the capabilities of digital twins, firms such as IBM and Siemens have also made significant strides in this sector. Siemens categorizes digital twins into three frameworks—product, production, and performance digital twins—while others differentiate between component, asset, system, and process twins.
Chevron has taken a strategic and methodical approach in developing its digital twin capabilities. Between 2015 and 2017, the company explored the technology with inspiration from the aerospace and defence industries, ultimately developing a framework that incorporates analytics and visualisation. In a partnership with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) announced in 2020, Chevron has rapidly scaled the deployment of digital twins across its facilities and aims to complete 13 out of 28 targeted sites by the end of 2024.
Keith Johnson, Chevron’s manager of digital engineering, noted that the early implementations of digital twins aimed to reduce labour costs linked to major projects like Gorgon and Wheatstone in Australia. He observed that digital workflows could alleviate some of the burdens associated with manual tasks traditionally performed by engineers. “What became apparent was that if you digitize some of the workflows… you could reduce the burden from a cost perspective,” Johnson stated.
Despite initial skepticism regarding the efficacy of digital twins among traditional facility engineers, Johnson’s team persevered, reinforcing Chevron’s overarching commitment to technological advancement. The initial use of digital twins focused on basic monitoring tasks, evolving over time to become an integrated component within larger systems and corporate strategies. Johnson likened this foundational development to early computing systems, stating, “When we were looking at it, we were saying, ‘How are we going to analyze what we are seeing?’”
Shell is also making significant strides in the digital twin landscape, with Koren Dixon, a transformational change manager, emphasising the importance of “the right data in the right hands at the right time, in the right place” as the company seeks to enhance its decision-making processes through improved data modelling and cleaning efforts.
While the transition to digital thinking presents challenges, Kongsberg Digital’s Grant Christie draws parallels between the oil and gas sector and the operational changes seen in aerospace during fiscal constraints. He remarked on the necessity to shift from linear processes to more holistic, 3D decision-making approaches that incorporate diverse datasets into comprehensive strategic choices.
As the oil and gas industry continually evolves, the implementation of digital twins is expected to further transform operational workflows and decision-making processes, reflecting the growing synergy between digital technologies and traditional industry practices.
Source: Noah Wire Services
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