GE?s digital solution to improve oil & gas industry performance

With the oil and gas prices at its lowest in more than 20 years, and a growing need for increased efficiencies in the industry, GE is taking the lead to push for the use of digital solutions to pave the way for sustained growth in the energy industry, the US technology giant said in a statement on Tuesday.

?The oil & gas industry is facing unprecedented market environments,? said Visal Leng, Asia Pacific General Manager for GE Oil & Gas. ?There is no doubt that these are tough times. But at GE, we are up to the challenge and have a full suite of solutions that will give our customers the edge they need to remain on top.?

Leng, who was speaking on the sidelines of the 40th IPA (Indonesian Petroleum Association) Convention and Exhibition, continued, ?Across the globe ? and in Indonesia ? a new oil & gas landscape is evolving. This has been brought about by sharply falling international oil prices ? the lowest in more than two decades. As a result, there is intense pressure on margins and operators are reassessing their capacity while investors are reassessing their strategies. This is contributing to an environment of increased uncertainty and volatility.?

Elaborating on this, Iwan Chandra, President Director of GE Oil & Gas Indonesia said, ?The current environment of uncertainty and volatility means that oil & gas companies urgently need to address issues of downtime and operational costs, operational efficiency and equipment reliability. Addressing these issues against a backdrop of increased funding pressures will require a higher degree of flexibility and adaptability.?

?The demand for energy will continue to grow at an accelerated pace. Digitizing the energy ecosystem from end to end will be essential in helping meet this demand, enabling unprecedented opportunity socially, economically and individually. Now, especially given current market environments, it is more important than ever to innovate better, more cost-effective ways of meeting these needs. This is where collaboration is growing in importance. Collaboration is at GE?s core and increased partnership and collaboration in the industry is crucial to accelerate technology advancement, streamline specifications and enhance solutions building for customers. We have the unique ability to draw new solutions and technologies from GE Store - a global exchange of knowledge, technology and tools across the company, with the knowledge generated by a global team of 300,000 minds including 50,000 experts,? said Mr Chandra.

GE is pushing to harness its leadership in the industrial Internet, where machines, big data analytics and people are connected to transform global industries such as oil & gas. By pairing digital technology with its domain expertise across industries like aviation, energy, healthcare and transportation, GE is using the power of data to help customers make better and quicker decisions and to make their operations and equipment as productive and efficient as they can be.

?A big issue facing operators is downtime and any reduction in this area would yield big outcomes. As an example, each week a well is out of commission offshore, lost revenue to operators could be as much as US$3 million per week. For a mid-sized LNG facility, the average annual cost for unplanned downtime could be up to US$150 million. Considering the size of Indonesia?s oil & gas industry, the total loss through downtime could be staggering. The use of digital solutions can go a long way to minimize or eliminate these unnecessary costs,? said Chandra.

In addition to downtime, production efficiencies can also be improved through digital solutions. The average world oil recovery rate is approximately 35%. If the use of the Industrial Internet can improve recovery rates by just 1%, it could result in an additional 80 billion barrels of oil or the equivalent of about three years of global oil production.

Industrial Internet solutions for the oil and gas industry are already being deployed. The coming years will see a rapid acceleration in the pace at which new solutions are deployed and scaled, largely thanks to Predix, GE?s cloud-based operating system for the Industrial Internet. Predix will not only enable the secure and efficient adoption of Industrial Internet solutions but by attracting the efforts of third-party developers, it will also foster the birth of an industrial-app economy that will act as an accelerator.

With the use of Predix, production operators can have full view of their wells, improving their operations by giving visibility on well performance and the analytical insights to optimize production and lower cost.

Meanwhile, for pipelines, operators benefit from improved risk management and are able to make quicker, faster decisions about safety and pipeline integrity using the analytical insights to predict potential issues and prioritize resources efficiently. For facilities such as LNG plants, Predix can help to maintain high availability reliability throughout the plant through advanced monitoring and diagnostics.

Predix-based digital solutions will be the cornerstone of GE?s participation at the 40th IPA Convention and Exhibition. In addition to reaching out to industry players, GE is also aiming to share its expertise in oil & gas by inviting over 200 students from leading Indonesian universities such as Universitas Indonesia, Institut Teknologi Bandung and Universitas Trisakti.

Editing by Johannes Simbolon