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FEATURE Big Data “A majority of data is not really analyzed or processed. It’s collected and neglected,” Abbo says. He believes this data is

The Weather Company provides its the key to enormous potential: reducing the breakeven price offshore customers a weather-based dashboard that drives alerts. of oil and improving safety and reliability of operations.

According to BHGE, AI in the oil and gas segment helps improve overall performance by ingesting massive quan- tities of data, becoming intelligent about specific opera- tional environments and predicting problems before they occur so that operators can improve planning, staffing, sourcing and safety.

Dan Brennan, BHGE’s VP of Digital, says, “Arti? cial intel- ligence and machine learning technology can really help add signi? cant value” in categories like equipment reliability and production optimization. The promise of AI is that it can help companies “unlock value from the constant in? ux of opera- tional data as well as data that has been stranded from 10 years ago,” he says.

Shell has long used BHGE’s JewelSuite for reservoir mod- eling, and in 2018 announced use of the C3.ai platform to accelerate the company’s digital transformation, focusing on using AI and machine learning to improve overall operations starting with predictive maintenance.

Recently, BHGE and C3.ai announced the launch of the

AI-enabled BHC3 Reliability application, which uses his- torical and real-time data from entire systems to identify anomalous conditions that lead to equipment failure and process upsets.

Engineering practices “Oil and gas has been digitalizing forever. Reservoir mod- els, seismic, but nobody’s really digitizing the topsides,” says Dean Watson, Aker Solutions’ chief operating of? cer and executive vice president for subsea lifecycle services.

Part of the problem has been around making sense out of the data because manufacturers digitally refer to equipment in dif- tap into an offshore installation’s history to search for infor- ferent ways and operators use different naming convention for mation about how a problem was solved, he says, so the com- equipment such as compressors on a facility. Further, various pany created the Engineering Assistant app, which is basically software systems all represent data in different ways, making “a search engine for engineers” to extract data from previous it dif? cult to integrate and extract data. projects much more quickly than before. “Even though they are similar, they are different,” says Are “That has enabled us to develop completely new solu-

Føllesdal Tjønn, who heads up ix3, the software and digital tions for how we do concept studies, FEED and engineer- services company to enable operators to accelerate ? eld de- ing projects,” saving weeks or months of engineering time, velopment projects and optimize asset performance that Aker Tjønn says.

Solutions launched in May. “We needed a solution where we could extract data from many sources and conceptualize it,

Forecasting bring meaning to it in a coherent and consistent way across Big data is even changing weather forecasting. Rob Ber- different sources and customer bases.” glund, energy solutions lead at The Weather Company, an

At its most basic, ix3 is about different ways of classify- IBM Business, said a decade ago, TWC would forecast ing data, so the team spent a lot of time and effort building 100,000 different points around the world. Doing so re- the semantic web and creating a semantic model of an in- quired major spreadsheets that forecasters around the globe dustrial asset. used to put out forecasts which they updated throughout

One of the challenges EPC contractors face is the ability to the day.

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