Progress is driven by digital transformation but, for many oil and gas companies, the promises are yet to be fully realized. Automation has made it easier to react to maintenance needs, but most operations are barely scratching the surface of digital insight and processes that could drive substantial business value. The goal is for digital transformation to make operations:

• More agile: Digital transformation enables greater visibility across operations, production and the value chain. AI and other analytical tools turn data into actionable insights to serve your business. This includes gaining visibility across operating processes to help pivot faster and inform strategic business goals.
• More efficient: Integration of digital technologies can help drive innovation and efficiency. Digital transformation can help with uncovering root causes, providing more consistent responses to issues and automating repetitive tasks. The ability to quickly analyze vast amounts of data also makes it easier to make timely, critical decisions with confidence.
• More resilient: Reactive maintenance has been a game-changer in the industry, but it’s not enough. Missed opportunities today can lead to longer turnaround times tomorrow. Digital transformation improves predictability to reduce downtime. With near real-time monitoring, advanced analytics and AI, facilities are operating smarter and safer.

These benefits are tangible for the oil and gas industry, but so are the challenges. The most common obstacles fall into three categories:

1. Talent deficits: Oil and gas companies tend to lack in-house staff and expertise for digital transformation. Recruiting and retaining talent is an industry-wide challenge, exacerbated by the fact that people with these kinds of digital skills are already in high demand.
2. Opaque legacy systems: Legacy systems and technologies don’t always play well together and make it difficult to have complete visibility. Some systems are advanced and connected. Others have operated on stand-alone tech for decades. Without a clear, single source of truth, operations are stymied in diagnosing issues, enacting consistent prevention measures and identifying process problems. It’s nearly impossible to make the most informed decisions because you may not even know where the blind spots are.
3. Lack of resources: No operation doubts that optimization is valuable, but dedicating time and labor is often impractical, as is investment in a slew of modern technology. Optimization falls off the to-do list in the face of immediate production needs, making it tough to move past the status quo.
4. For organizations that can overcome these roadblocks, digital tools and applications like AI provide the analytics to help mitigate risk, improve efficiency, evolve business models and provide better customer experiences.

Adding expertise to the equation

With the potential digital applications and an integrated platform hold to provide clearer visibility across operations, many industry companies are turning to third-party expertise to help optimize their digital capabilities. Honeywell Performance+ Services, for example, offers digital tools and consultancy with a foundation of deep expertise in the oil and gas industry. We connect into our customer’s process unit analytics and view it with our own data to help identify patterns and benchmarks. This creates an ecosystem of support to help your operations improve reliability, production rates, efficiency and profitability.

An effective third-party strategy should combine the customer’s knowledge of constraints, objectives and priorities, so the customer and experts create value together. Some of the possibilities with Honeywell Performance+ Services include improving unit efficiency and reliability by offering operational visibility, identifying performance gaps, and providing near real-time recommendations. AI capabilities like those offered by Honeywell Performance+ Services can help with predicting repair needs and establishing maintenance based on equipment data and sensors, rather than the calendar. This eliminates potentially unnecessary downtime, while still ensuring critical maintenance needs are met. Sophisticated digital capabilities like these plus dedicated expertise can transform teams from reactive to proactive, improving process issues, equipment failures, and performance optimization.

The calculated business impact of leveraging this type of digital expertise is substantial. For example, a medium-sized refinery processing 300 KBPD that implements advanced process controls optimization could improve their throughput by 2.5%. At a $13/BBL margin, this would deliver about $34 million a year in additional profit. This is from one process optimization. Imagine the effects of uncovering additional efficiencies or reducing downtime you thought was unavoidable.

When seen in this light, the costs of not leveraging digital tools and the right industry expertise become clear. With this support, operations can harness the potential in their digital landscape to drive meaningful business results.

References

¹ Predikly. (2024, November 11). Beyond the Oil Rig: How AI is Revolutionizing the Oil and Gas Industry. https://predikly.com/beyond-the-oil-rig-how-ai-is-revolutionizing-the-oil-and-gas-industry/