The coronavirus crisis has had a devastating effect on oil companies’ revenues, but it has also posed a complicated human resources problem: how to protect staff on narrow platforms at sea where social estating is impossible.
(Bloomberg) – The coronavirus crisis has had a devastating effect on oil companies’ revenues, but it has also posed a complicated human resources problem: how to keep staff on narrow platforms at sea where social esttachment is impossible.
Many operators have discovered a response in technology, especially in virtual twins. These interactive 3-D simulations of oil rigs and factories allow engineers to run for weeks in the narrow, sweaty confines of a wind-hit platform, rather than having virtual access from home. .
Digital twins are not a new idea, however, advances in computing, and widespread restrictions on coronaviruses, have helped them generalize in the oil industry, where the pandemic has swept groups of engineers running shoulder to shoulder.
“Covid-19 has been a catalyst for this kind of virtual innovation,” said Mitch Flegg, managing director of Serica Energy Plc, which uses the formula in one of its fields in the North Sea. “The need to operate with social estating measures has made virtual surveys even more evident. “
The North Sea has noticed several cases of coronavirus among staff on the platform. The disastrous epidemic among Mexican public producer Petróleos Mexicanos has been more publicized. Pemex’s knowledge shows that staff on its platform are 10 times more likely to die from the virus than the average Mexican citizen.
Focusing on digital
They want to protect employees while ensuring that the operation of the sites has driven investments in virtual generation this year, even as corporations cut spending in other areas.
“We’ve noticed that the vast majority of our consumers reduce their operating expenses, but they don’t reduce digitization budgets,” said Paula Doyle, senior vice president of sales and marketing at Cognite AS, a provider of virtual matching systems. Cognite signed a big contract only a week after the locks were implemented in Europe in March, as the price of remote paints clears, he said.
In Serica, engineers recently studied another 4,000 spaces in the Bruce del Mars box with a 3-d laser scan. A planned end-to-end virtual of the Bruce platform will allow the company to prevent specialists from entering and exiting as often as many frames. it can be done on the ground through visualizations.
The 3-d virtual models will be Serica’s shore team, which lately has been content with 2D drawings, to lead the crew on the high seas, according to Flegg.
Global growth
It’s just the North Sea where the generation has exploded. Cognite said he has noticed an adoption of virtual twins from the Gulf of Mexico in the United States to New Zealand.
With the existing generation, engineers can navigate virtually one site thousands of miles away, allowing them to design scenarios temporarily, save you cuts by identifying potential outages, and help them plan the installation or removal of heavy equipment, according to Yuri Sebregts, leader generation officer. at Royal Dutch Shell Plc. , display equipment also allows Shell to exercise in a realistic environment before sending them to remote installations.
“Now with Covid, of course, it is much more urgent than ever,” Sebregts said. Engineers must prepare for maintenance virtually, by visualizing access issues and the most productive locations for equipment. “It saves a lot of time on the ground,” he said.
Data image
To create a virtual dual of an oil rig, you need a lot of data, mapped over time. Resource transformation combines to shape an entire image: who built a specific bomb?Have you ever failed? How do you connect to the rest of the system?
“It’s the knowledge that brings raw knowledge to life in the time series and makes sense,” said Andy Bane, CEO of generation provider Element Analytics.
Beyond virtual twins, oil corporations are expanding the use of technologies such as helmet-mounted cameras with augmented reality, which allow remote guiding on the high seas through land specialists. The deployment of such an apparatus is “increasing exponentially” amid the pandemic, Sebregts said.
Because platforms and refineries are incredibly complex operations, virtual technologies have their limits. It takes time, cash and the right people to create detailed visualizations, and that would possibly not be mandatory for each and every project. Digitizing responsibilities can also, in some cases, cause fear among the workforce. This month, oil workers in Norway went on strikes, saying that the relocation of some work at sea to land was in line with their collective agreement.
But for the most part, the virus crisis is more acceptance of digitization across the industry.
According to Sebregts, Shell plans to use a type of virtual dual generation in all its activities over time. In some cases, it can be used for a single computer; For new assets with a long lifespan, it may make sense to have a full system implementation.
“What you see are necessarily new ideas,” he said. But the urgency is much greater and users are much more open to adopting this quickly. “
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