Digital assets

zoom

Manuel Terranova of GE.

High value assets need to be well looked after to protect them and their productivity. Remote monitoring and diagnostics, made possible through the increasing use of digital technology, is making asset maintenance more effective and a cost-effective component in the digital oilfield.

With oil prices high, the role of these high-value assets, which are central to production capacity and companies' ability to do business, is under more scrutiny. The value of the end product has changed the economics of these assets, making the benefits of preventative technologies more attractive than in the past and adding further financial motivation to the maturation of the digital oilfield concept.

"The oil and gas business in GE has done remote monitoring diagnostics for a while," said Manuel Terranova, general manager Integrity Services for GE PII Pipeline Solutions. "It's largely been around the ability to monitor equipment and do predictive maintenance, by watching a series of sensor inputs from anywhere in the world, either through fixed land lines or through satellite networks."

"Anywhere you go now in GE there is a sense of tying in the asset base to real-time monitoring. It's becoming big business for us, no doubt about it."

However, Terranova points out that there is a lot of work to do to make the digital oilfield a fully functioning concept.

"Step one is to get your assets represented in a digital way and that's not something that should be assumed to be complete," he said.

"In the digital oilfield you can't forget where you have to start. A lot of the infrastructure was built just at the cusp of the electronic age. Assets were designed and put into the ground - mostly pipelines, associated facilities and compressor stations - most of which went in over 20 years ago. So the idea of having a CAD based design for a pipeline just hadn't happened, whereas we take it for granted now that everyone has their asset base digitised."

Terranova explained that what GE is doing for a number of its customers is creating that data model. This makes one of the key challenges how to capture, store and maintain a customer's assets, whether static pipelines or rotating turbines.

"You want to get all the data you can and define business risks to turn that data into digestable information for the customer," said Terranova. "If a sensor is great but it can't communicate effectively it's not really worth a lot of money.

"The ultimate value proposition comes if you are able to digitise the asset and give customers data that indicates how quickly that asset is changing physically," said Terranova. "By being able to understand the state of the asset at any given moment it lets you spend your maintenance money more effectively. It's not rocket science, but it does involve risk algorithms and most importantly, defining the asset in the first place, whether rotary, static or sub sea."

Print | Email | Discuss this article |

USER COMMENTS (0 COMMENTS)

POST A COMMENT

CLICK HERE TO POST A COMMENT

Add your Comment All posts are sent to the administrator for review and are published only after approval. ArabianBusiness.com reserves the right to remove any comment at any time for any reason. Please keep your responses appropriate and on topic.
Name *
Remember me on this computer
Email *	(Your email address will not be published)
City
Country
Subject *
Comment *
Notify me of further comments
Security Code *
Please click post only once - your comment will not be published immediately.