With assets that are often located in remote and hostile environments, it is essential to have reliable and efficient methods for maintenance, monitoring, and inspection within the oil and gas sector. Recent technological advancements are providing new opportunities to automate tasks and improve their efficiency and effectiveness.
In the last couple of years, organisations have expedited digital transformation efforts, fuelling more investment to support automation of key business processes to eliminate human fault analysis and improve operational effectiveness.
Most innovative enterprises commence their automation journey with routine and rules-based
tasks. Subsequently, they expand while drawing self-learning by:
Incorporating artificial intelligence and machine learning architecture
Inserting layers of cross data utilisation and governance
Integrating functional and industry knowledge into automation initiatives
The data allows the business leaders to comprehend the benefit obtained from efficient and effective feedback of asset allocation, increase production, reduce employee burden, achieve higher safety levels and generate higher ROI. The oil and gas industry already has a wealth of data from machinery such as logging tools, sensors, and geophones to create comprehensive information sets that provide automation value. IA offers an advanced way to leverage these data streams for critical insights and deliver enterprise-wide connectivity.
As per Mordor Intelligence, the investment in AI by oil and gas companies was valued at USD 2,040.89 million in 2019, and it is expected to reach a value of USD 3,349.89 million by 2026 while registering a CAGR of 10.14% during the forecast period (2021-2026). Digital Twins are part of the Intelligence Automation (IA) scheme that leverages AI to create scenarios and decide on the action plan.
The oil and gas sector has a tremendous opportunity to carefully evaluate the risk and innovate to enhance their operations to meet changing environments by embracing IA technologies like the digital twin that allow real-time data analytics and elevate benchmarks for predictive analysis of assets. Predictive analytics can decrease flaring outage increase reliability and reduce emissions. By leveraging IA organisations can give a flawless alert to EHS personnel when risks are expected to breach limited levels.
Oil and Gas have clear benefits to adopt intelligent automation across upstream, midstream, and downstream operations.
Upstream oil and gas
Upstream activities prioritise enhancing exploration, ROI, and risk management at the vanguard.
Machine learning algorithms and AI control the precise drilling performance when optimising opportunities by scanning and identifying the optimum property.
Cutting-edge data management helps the field engineer with decision-making.
IA provides continued analysis of problem situations and provides insights from a vast quantity of rich data.
Virtual assistance or chatbots facilitate search optimisation for field employees.
Midstream and downstream oil and gas
In comparison to the upstream and downstream, mid-stream value chains have observed intelligent automation technologies to:
Manage manufacturing functions that provide system assistance such as inventory control, management, asset downtime management, supply chain monitoring, and generating insight at positive affect.
Conversation automation enables NLP and NLG to add value to marketing and sales teams outcomes.
Technologies that cover conversation, vision, and intelligence have made a critical impact in recent times as the need for remote work increased substantially.
IA is a valuable tool that can be used to improve operations in the oil and gas sector. The IA adoption is beneficial not only for the front line, service level functions but also for those functions where data volumes are high and data flow is relentless. It helps middle management to strengthen interconnection between stakeholders and discover the unknown in the business environment. There is no doubt IA will enable enterprises to stay competitive and determine the future of work. As a result, business leaders can reap triple wins i.e. cost redemption, efficiency gains and being future-ready.