HP March 2022 eBook—Energy Transition - 80

Special Focus The Digital Plant
F. MARTINS, AVEVA, São Paulo, Brazil
What if your plant were truly digital?
With the increasing volatility of the oil and gas markets (involving
price fluctuations and oil demand uncertainties) and
stricter environmental constraints, a new normal for the world
is being built right in front of us. To succeed, companies must
reinvent the way they manage business and operations. They
will need to be nimble and resilient, connected and collaborative-and
this will require radically different thinking.
Higher levels of digital maturity will be required to face new
challenges. Digital transformation used to be driven by an increase
in competitive market pressures. However, as a result of
the COVID-19 pandemic, the drivers to invest in digital capabilities
have pivoted from optimization and growth toward ensuring
safe remote operations and also toward gathering and
analyzing the right data across the organization to make optimal
business decisions.
In this new normal, only the most robust and agile energy
companies will survive in the long run. The strong players have
full visibility on how market changes impact their business in
real time, and on mechanisms that can enable them to quickly
act to mitigate risks and to explore small windows of opportunity
to improve margins.
TOP DIGITAL APPROACHES
TO BEAT UNCERTAINTY
While the market and drivers have changed, new technologies
and digital trends continue to emerge-leveraging massive
remote communications, and continuity of operations and
maintenance. They also provide secure access to information
and analysis tools that enable critical decision making in response
to constant market fluctuations. While digital solutions
and big data are available, the competitive advantage will come
from the way oil companies explore this technology and employ
it. To be prepared for future downturns, it is important
to evaluate various " what-if " scenarios. Following are the top
digital approaches that oil companies should consider when
facing these market uncertainties:
Planning and network optimization. Against the backdrop
of today's depressed oil prices, along with the global oversupply
and drop in oil demand, oil companies must continually evaluate
their production planning. They need to be flexible and to replan
several times a day to rapidly react to market fluctuations. To
take advantage of economic opportunities and to quickly react
to every change, the planning process must allow the evaluation
of numerous scenarios featuring different crude grades, oil prices
and possible future demands. Having the agility to provide the
best use of assets and to run scenarios for building short- and
long-term plans for maximum profit will define which companies
are going to succeed.
For larger players, single-site and multi-site modeling with
network optimization will help improve the understanding of the
interaction between assets/sites and the business itself (FIG. 1).
This is the type of visibility required to allow the best decisions
when faced with rapidly changing or uncertain information.
Besides selecting the best technology and defining the best
processes to enable traders and planners to work better and
more collaboratively, there is another key aspect to ensure success:
cloud-enabled solutions. In the past few years, the cloud
was considered an emerging trend adopted by companies that
were ahead of their time and that were seeking to improve efficiency
and reduce information technology (IT) costs. At
present, it is a crucial element to promote speed and collaboration,
as most employees are currently working from their
homes. In 2017, BP moved several applications to the cloud,
including its unified supply chain management platform. This
implementation was so successful that Claire Dickson, CIO
for Downstream at BP, made the following statement about
the production planning application: " Believe it or not, for
the same data set, the same crude and feedstocks, the same
units, what used to take us seven hours to run now takes just
over three minutes. I have to admit I didn't really think that
we'd get that out of the cloud, so it has been quite revolutionary
for us. " 1,2
Value chain optimization. The instability of the oil industry
makes the energy value chain even more complicated than
FIG. 1. Network distribution optimization model.
Hydrocarbon Processing | JULY 2020 | HydrocarbonProcessing.com
http://www.HydrocarbonProcessing.com
HP March 2022 eBook—Energy Transition

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of HP March 2022 eBook—Energy Transition
