Aberdeen-based Robert Gordon University (GRU) announced in mid-September it was teaming up with three companies to carry out research into the digital transformation of the oilfield, as part of a Scottish government backed research effort aimed at giving the smaller oil companies active in the UK Continental Shelf a leg-up in their bid to capture the advantage of digital solutions of this maturing basin.

It is another pointer to the collaborative drivers at play in the North Sea. The Oil & Gas Innovation Centre (OGIC), funded by the Scottish government in a bid to bring top quality research and development expertise to the oil and gas industry’s innovation challenges, is backing three research projects centred on how digitalization can improve efficiency and provide cost savings to the oil and gas industry, through new approaches to exploration tasks.

The three companies – DNV GL, a technical advisor to the global oil and gas industry, multidisciplinary data analytics company, ComplyAnts and Software company, IDS --  will work with RGU’s School of Computing Science and Digital Media to carry out the research.

As OGIC CEO Ian Phillips told Upstream Intelligence, the fact that the three companies approached OGIC regarding these digital projects is reflective of a dramatic change sweeping through the industry. “We didn’t have many digital projects 18 months ago, but now we’ve got new companies and established ones like DNV GL looking to apply advanced digital technology to real world challenges,” he said.

Phillips points to a dramatic rise in the number of projects in its pipeline that have a digital analytics focus. “The real opportunity is where people are using artificial intelligence (AI) software to sift through huge volumes of data to make sense of it.”

Taking its lead from the aviation sector, where manufacturers of jet engines have put sensors on machinery and learned over time that patterns of vibration are a precursor to equipment failure – and that monitoring those patterns will alert companies to take preventive steps – the oil and gas sector is now seeing more of these applications.

Interactive approach

The DNV GL project is a case in point. It is extracting information from diagrams of structures, piping and instrumentation and other types of engineering drawings to create  a digital twin of the platform.

This will speed up the collection of data for use in a number of technical applications. Phase one of the project was completed with support from The Data Lab, another Scottish innovation centre with phase two being primarily supported by OGIC. Working with RGU, phase two will build on the methods and algorithms developed by phase one of the project.

“You are talking about taking tens of thousands of drawings, making sense of them all and integrating them to develop a 3D representation of the platform,” said Phillips. “That sort of machine learning capability is just mind-blowing.”  

Dr. Eyad Elyan, a reader in machine learning and the project academic lead at RGU, said it “enables our team to apply cutting edge research in machine learning to solve challenging industrial problems by intelligently mining and exploiting large volumes of structured and unstructured data such as images, text documents and others”.

ComplyAnts, a new company formed by a series of experienced industry figures, provides management and workflow software that enables businesses to comply with international regulations and standards. It is   working to develop an automated system to manage the compliance process. RGU will utilise AI to develop an automated system to manage the end-to-end compliance process pipeline. The project aims to deliver a fully functional prototype within twelve months.

Software company, IDS, is meanwhile working to develop a data-driven tool to predict task durations, associated risk and NPT. This is phase two of the project, with phase one, which was supported by The Data Lab, seeing the development of a natural language processing (NLP) library which classifies engineering terms within a daily report. These are then mapped to allow benchmarking and data analysis. This will reduce the amount of time it takes engineers to work with offset data.

Ecosystem in place

These digital oilfield projects are founded on a supportive ecosystem put in place in Scotland, with eight separate innovation centres founded by the Scottish government, alongside RGU, the Data Lab and the Oil and Gas Technology Centre, OGTC, whose role is to de-risk and support technology solutions that are coming along at an early stage.

An industry-led research and knowledge organisation, OGTC is backed by both the UK and Scottish governments to fund and direct projects that help to unlock the full potential of the UK North Sea. Working through solution centres, it encourages, leads and co-funds industry-initiated technology projects to develop and deploy commercial-ready solutions.

Source: Upstream Intelligence    l     KeyFacts Energy Industry Directory: Upstream Intelligence