Stepping stones for continuous optimization

Perhaps the greatest challenge facing oil and gas companies today is how to increase recovery and production rates while simultaneously reducing operating costs. Key ways of achieving this goal include: reducing unplanned and planned shutdowns in order to maximize production and decrease maintenance costs; improving productivity from real-time visibility of measurements with data-driven visualization across environment; speeding decision making with more intelligent alerts and events; achieving better cost control with easier replication of best practices event and alert capabilities across assets and processes; and collaborating with your experts across engineering, maintenance, business planning, finance, etc. At the same time, safety and reliability remain paramount to all companies.

Taking advantage of a highly instrumented oil and gas landscape, IBM has unveiled a new framework to help transform the way data is gathered, connected and analyzed, creating actionable insight to improve production facilities. The Chemical and Petroleum Integrated Information Framework enables stepping stone solutions that allow for continuous optimization and help increase production while reducing ongoing operating costs.

A unified software framework allows companies to aggregate real-time information from disparate assets to simultaneously monitor different oil platforms, oilfields and facilities. The result: a single, comprehensive view of the state of their production facilities whereby companies can improve extraction, production, operational and asset management activities. It enables visibility and process collaboration with alerts and event management to speed problem determination plus optimize existing resources in several domains.

Integrated operations

The framework makes the vision of an intelligent oilfield possible by helping companies build an integrated reference semantic model that uniquely identifies facilities and operations based on industry standards, providing the abstraction needed to present data in context of equipment without the custom logic of point to point integrations or siloed applications. This provides the foundation for integrated operations services such asset turnaround optimization, well and production performance reporting and condition-based monitoring.

This framework allows oil companies to monitor platform rotating equipment in order to identify problems before breakdowns occur, thereby improving the availability of drilling platforms. The same software platform can connect offshore platforms with onshore experts for optimization of turnarounds and real-time collaboration to help them respond more quickly and accurately as situations develop. 

Similarly, in downstream operations, refineries must improve unit operations performance and connect extensive control systems and other production systems at the facility and plant level with maintenance and resource planning systems to make more intelligent decisions to reach desired optimization objectives.

Enterprise asset management

IBM Maximo for Oil and Gas can help manage production equipment, facilities, transportation and IT assets consistently and efficiently, integrating asset management with planning and operational systems at facility and enterprise levels. The results of this continuous optimization can allow a transformation from a reactive to predictive asset management, reducing costs and increasing production.

Supply chain management optimization

Another stepping stone to cost savings is optimization-based supply chain planning and scheduling, utilizing existing Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and advanced scheduling and planning information.  The optimization can consider factors such as cost, locations and carbon footprint.

Location awareness and safety

For upstream and downstream processes, another stepping stone is using sensors with location awareness to build sensor event solutions for critical resources and processes.  For example, applying real-time location tracking can help avoid safety issues. 

An industry framework provides a configurable software platform to accelerate deployment of business solutions. By combining industry-specific, business process management, business analytics and optimization capabilities based on industry standards, the framework is the foundation for continuous optimization from IBM Global Business Services (GBS) and partner business solutions.  

For more, see ibm.com/software/industry/frameworks/chemical_petroleum.html.

BIO

David M. Womack is IBM Global Director of Strategy and Business Development for the Chemicals and Petroleum and Industrial Products Sectors, responsible for creation and management of the overall strategy, business unit plans, points of view and complex solution development activities.