Today’s oil, gas and chemical facilities can involve thousands of wells and hundreds of miles of pipeline that must operate within strict environmental and safety regulations.
When operations approach their limits, risks and costs increase. Also, facilities might operate over distances measured in thousands of miles. Reacting to problems can be difficult, which provides a significant incentive to:
Deploy enterprise-wide digitalization and connectivity
Bring together information and operational technologies
Pursue simplification and standardization wherever feasible
Commit to a digitally-focused approach
Manually collecting and analyzing vast amounts of data, often from functionally siloed systems, can result in data inaccuracy, inconsistencies and incompleteness. This can lead to decisions based on incorrect, missing or out-of-date information. There is also a risk that decisions will be made too late, which can have significant risk and cost implications.
To succeed competitively, oil and gas fields need to operate at exceptional levels of availability and productivity. Ensuring these outcomes without incurring large CapEx or investing in personnel is a challenge.