Today more than ever, the oil and gas industry is driven by data. Bert Natalicchio, VP engineering and Smart technologies at Shell discusses how drilling wells to process automation at the refinery, and collecting information to drive faster and better decision making is fundamental to success.
To increase the accuracy and effectiveness of decision-making in the oil and gas industry, data must be as near to live as possible. That means that, like other data-intensive businesses, the oil and gas industry is shifting from a batch approach to an increasingly real-time world. This need for speed is driving huge investment by Shell to better connect its different business units and support operations intelligence initiatives like the company’s Smart Solutions programme.
"In oil and gas, the ability to use information seriously affects your competitiveness and the bottom line," says Bert Natalicchio, VP engineering and Smart technologies at Shell. "It significantly affects how well you can use your facilities and extract the most from your investment in production and manufacturing."
A growing array of sensors lies at one end of the data communications chain. Those might be wire-line or MWD well tools, remotely controlled drones with video cameras, or the machine-monitoring devices and actuators used by supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems. The volume of data they send and the speed at which it needs to be delivered are rising rapidly.
For example, the modelling and imaging software used to remotely support smart drilling and enhanced oil recovery techniques works in real time. That requires extremely fast data transmission speeds as low as 100ms – a tenth of a second. Remote valve control systems might need network speeds an order of magnitude faster.
On your marks
The first challenge is to link all these sensors together locally. Though reliability has been questionable in the past, wireless networks and instrumentation are now becoming the default choice for this task.
Most wireless hardware deployed thus far in oil and gas operations has speeds slower than 2Mb a second, but faster and more capable networks are now being installed in locations like Oman. Modern industrial Wi-Fi and 3G/4G networks using technologies like LTE offer reliable, high-speed voice and data links, with 20-30km radius coverage possible from the latest base stations. This makes it more feasible to interconnect large areas on or offshore using multiple base stations.
"Rather than trying to cover a whole geographical region, it’s usually more realistic to use a localised 3G/4G network to provide coverage for sensors and staff communications at a frontier production facility," says Natalicchio. "There are ways to leverage relatively off-the-shelf telecommunications technology by industrialising it to make it more suitable for remote operations.
"Industrial wireless is significantly different to what you would typically see in an office environment," he continues. "To make the measurement of plant data operationally reliable, it’s more sophisticated in how the data is repeated and in the redundancies built into the system."
Offering high-uplink bandwidth to handle all that sensor data is just one way in which these networks must differ from conventional home and business ASDL broadband links. Compatibility with a raft of different device data transmission standards and tight data security are two further demands.
Standards that allow automatic connections and minimise set-up are also desirable. Just as a smartphone automatically finds and links to the nearest mobile base station, so too should wireless oilfield equipment.
Picking up the pace
The next step is to connect local networks to other parts of the business that may be thousands of miles away. In Europe, this is straightforward.
A refinery can simply plug into the local telecoms infrastructure, giving a high-bandwidth internet link to Shell’s central offices. But, remote operations are more challenging.
"For very remote areas, you may want to accumulate that data and send it in a bulk-packaged way [at intervals]," says Natalicchio. "That makes it more economical."
Satellite communications and microwave links are the two established choices here. Satellite offers rapid deployment and huge flexibility, but has low data throughput and high latency. Point-to-point microwave has solid reliability and high speeds, but cannot connect to moving ships and exploration drilling rigs.
Range can also be an issue, with microwave links limited to around 100km. Today, fibre is often the first option. Though expensive to install, it offers swift throughput and low latency.
"Satellite and microwave have improved considerably in their effectiveness, reliability and bandwidth, but if you are looking at a large new asset offshore, more likely than not, it will be economically attractive to go with fibre," says Natalicchio. "However, running fibre across the ground in very remote places would be a huge challenge. You need to look at the bandwidth required and the economics of each location."
These point-to-point networks usually link back to regional facilities like Shell’s giant Gulf of Mexico control centre in New Orleans, US. The result is a communications infrastructure able to pipe vast data volumes to and from almost any part of Shell’s global business. But how best to exploit it?
"We have all this data flowing in," says Natalicchio. "How do we run analysis on it, and connect people with the data and the results of that analysis, then ultimately make good decisions and enact those in the facilities themselves?"
It would be impossible for an engineer presented with 10,000 pieces of data on a facility’s operating performance to examine and interpret each one in a reasonable amount of time. Systems are needed that can alert technicians to data outside expected ranges, helping them to visualise information and work out where to invest their energy in solving problems. Shell has been building innovative solutions to this kind of challenge for decades in its upstream and downstream operations. But in the past, each business application stood alone, with its own custom data formats, hardware platforms and collection of middleware – to link software applications to databases and live sensor data – along with the network connectivity needed to access remote data sources.
The result was system and data duplication, poor application integration and processes that worked in isolation from the rest of the business. Globally, separate systems with incompatible software and databases meant limited opportunities for reuse; most development projects had to start from scratch.
Relay team
To share intelligence effectively and efficiently across the business, Shell decided to build a central system that all business units could tap into. That became the Smart Solutions Platform (SSP); a hugely ambitious enterprise operations intelligence (OI) project Rather than business intelligence, which focuses on historical information like revenue or profit margin, OI is more about optimising day-to-day activities. It answers questions such as ‘how am I doing against objectives?’ and ‘what is the best thing to do now, given these current conditions?’.
"Smart Solutions has been on a ten-year journey," says Natalicchio. "That has meant tying old systems together, adding new systems, creating protocols for the connections and data structures, and creating new means to access all the different pieces of information from many different data sources."
A key goal for SSP was a "single version of the truth", with a master location and owner for every piece of data in Shell. One enabler for this is a common data model – EDaM or enterprise data model – used across upstream and downstream equipment, facilities, fields, reservoirs and regions. Along with allied initiatives like master data management, having the same data structure makes it much easier for any system component to make use of any data – wherever in the world it resides.
Oil-and-gas-specific middleware like Siemens XHQ is a critical part of the solution. This helps create a data services layer, a vast array of standardised feeds that make data available in the required combinations and views to suit the needs of different users.
Remote users simply plug into these feeds via platforms as diverse as a control and monitoring system in a refinery, a web browser on a laptop or a lightweight application on a mobile or tablet. Standard software tools for visualisation, reporting, analytics and user interfaces also make it easier to build and reuse applications via the SSP’s smart store and smart apps.
"The basics of how you monitor something like a pump in terms of pressure, flow and inspection data will be common across most businesses," says Natalicchio. "You can create generic software that can then be tailored to suit specific line-of-business applications."
A winning model
SSP first appeared in working form in 2011, and has steadily been improved since. It is now used right across upstream production and mining as well as downstream manufacturing to support an incredibly diverse range of applications, from monitoring well testing and reservoir analysis to predicting and preventing failures in components like compressors.
Shell describes the current system as the "integrated application of engineering, process automation, optimisation, information and collaboration technologies applied to asset performance and integrity management across the entire asset life cycle". With reliable field data at their fingertips, staff can identify bottlenecks, evaluate remedial options, make timely decisions and effectively implement interventions.
"The most recent work is about connecting the data to more sophisticated tools," says Natalicchio. "That means being able to look at individual variables and values, whole models of production or manufacturing plants, and being able to understand those operations in a more holistic way."
Covered in the 2013 volume two edition of World Expro, Shell’s Smart Mobile Worker (SMW) technology project is another example of how the SSP infrastructure can be exploited. Remotely based experts access real-time sensor data from workers kitted out with GPS trackers, helmets with cameras and voice integration, temperature-monitoring devices and a range of other tools, and then offer their advice to help staff make the right decision. This reduces employee travel, speeds up breakdown repair, improves HSE performance and ultimately improves efficiency.
"Shell has made a substantial investment to build this platform," says Natalicchio. "As we learn more about the tools and techniques, new opportunities present themselves. We’re going to see continuing investment in Smart Solutions over the next decade."