Page 20: of Offshore Engineer Magazine (Sep/Oct 2020)

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FEATURE THE DIGITAL FIELD

WHEN IT COMES TO OFFSHORE ENERGY’S

DIGITAL PATH, BAKER HUGHES TAKES IT TO THE ‘NEXT LEVEL’

By Greg Trauthwein e are doing something amazing in Baker monitoring. At the end of the day we’re leveraging all of these

Hughes,” said Alex Seinuah, the leader of technologies to provide a cleaner solution for our customers.”

Baker Hughes’ Growth Initiatives Hub. “I “ call the hub a start-up business. Within the Quantity & Quality: The Data Conundrum

W hub we look at disruptive technologies and services that we Central to any digitalization initiative is, obviously, the data believe will deliver value to our customers. Within the hub itself. “Data they say is the new oil, but you don’t get much we look at digital specifcally for production optimization, out of data by itself,” said Seinuah. Data in and of itself has condition monitoring, remote support, smart IMR and asset little value, a problem exacerbated by the oceans of data cur- integrity, which helps us baseline assets and develop felds for rently being collected and disseminated. According to Seinu- our customers.” ah, the key is having the ability to take the data and bake it “Digitalization is all about leveraging digital technologies with other information to form an analysis.

that will be an enabler and improve processes,” said Seinuah. “I’ll take you to the top side of and FPSO and its Master “I spent more than fve years offshore, and when I was out Control Station (MCS),” said Seinuah. “Within that area you there, you had limited connectivity. If you needed to call the have a lot of information coming out – hydraulic data, elec- beach for support, the only way to make that call was to use trical data, comms data – all of this is coming at you, but the the phone in the company man’s offce; the only way to send question is: what are you going to do with this data?” an email was to use the company man’s laptop. When you’re Within engageSubsea Seinuah said Baker Hugues have a stuck, you didn’t have any way to communicate with your way to connect and display the data, to run trends on the team on the beach for support.” data, and ultimately to provide salient advice to the end cus-

Fast forward to today, and most DP rigs have good connec- tomer on actions they can take to their fnancial beneft. “For tivity. “We can leverage that to provide remote support. We example, say we’ve been getting this electrical signal, we’ve are leveraging this connectivity – WiFi, internet, satellite – to been getting it for a few weeks, and it looks like a poten- provide remote support for our assets and efforts offshore.” tial problem with a pump and we need to take a look,” said

Baker Hughes’ Subsea Connect business model looks at the Seinuah. With engageSubsea Baker Hughes can help to de- offshore feld holistically, designed to help accelerate time to cipher the data, leverage our condition monitoring platform production, maximize recovery over the life of the feld and and determine the kinds of information we need to be able to reduce their total expenditures, aiming to lower the cost of connect, display and run trends analyses.

subsea projects by an average of 30%. While gaining actionable intelligence from data and cut-

Subsea Connect aims to connect, horizontally and verti- ting costs may seem logical enough, Seinuah noted that it’s cally, the entire subsea development process. “Within Subsea never easy as it appears, as companies in the feld can be

Connect we’ve launched engageSubsea,” said Seinuah, which fercely protective of their data. “On the fip side, sometimes is a digital platform designed to provide ‘unprecedented ac- the customer does not want to share too much data with you cess’ to real-time information on equipment status and loca- because of data migration issues, and because of the potential tion “This platform provides remote support and condition to expose production data,” which ultimately could impact a 20 OFFSHORE ENGINEER OEDIGITAL.COM