Oil IT Journal: Volume 28 Number 1


The Industrial Metaverse – myth or meme?

For Microsoft, the Industrial Metaverse is transformational. Aveva ain't so sure. For Cognite it’s a "buzzword that died before taking off"!

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2023 World Economic Forum digital track

Data, AI and quantum to save the world! Accenture-backed "Digital Climate Network" and "Digital Solutions Explorer". Shell’s 2023+ Roadmap. Worley’s strategy-first approach. WEC announces Centre for Trustworthy Technology.

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On the creeping cost of the cloud

Editor Neil McNaughton compares the 20th Century Telcos’ evolution with the 21st Century birth of the Cloud provider. Both promised cheap bandwidth - comms for the telcos, compute for the clouds. But while comms costs are massively down, compute costs seem to be rising. And the unregulated cloud providers are much more successful at adding bells, whistles and lock-in to their services. With OSDU a case in point. But where is the end user in all of this?

About thirty years ago the big thing was not the cloud but the internet. I attended a meeting organized by what was then France Telcom as it was transmuting from a public utility to ‘Orange’, a private company. The meeting was to thrash-out exactly what should come under the new Orange’s purview. I offered my own suggestion along the lines of, ‘just give us the bandwidth and we will do the rest’. I’m not sure who ‘we’ were at the time. Anyhow my suggestion was very poorly received. There was no way that France Telecom was going to keep a ‘utility’ model in its transformation. It was going to add its own bells and whistles to the internet and it has subsequently done a pretty good job of this. As indeed it has with the provision of low cost bandwidth. A win-win in fact. Or rather a win-win-win as the regulator* has been a guiding hand in a country where fiber connectivity is now available even at the most remote locations and at very reasonable cost.

If the deal in the late 20th Century was the provision of communications bandwidth, the deal in the 21st Century has been the provision of compute bandwidth from the cloud. But the simple value proposition – of vanishingly cheap compute cycles – is much less in evidence as the more or less unregulated cloud providers add their own bells, whistles and more.

A report from Accenture ‘The race to cloud: Reaching the inflection point to long sought value’ fits the paradigm nicely. While the past two years have seen a ‘surge in cloud commitment’, with companies increasing the scope and volume of their cloud initiatives, achieving ‘full cloud value’ is at a ‘tipping point’ with some in ‘cloud transformation limbo’. Only 45% report that they have ‘fully achieved the expected value’, in the form of ‘business enablement’, achieved by ‘unlocking core digital capabilities and ongoing innovation needed to exploit new opportunities’.

This sounds a bit nebulous. But what of the original case for cloud computing, cost savings? Accenture reports that ‘cost savings remain the most elusive of the outcomes’. Only 39% reported fully achieving their cost expectations, ‘perhaps the most frustrating finding for many, as cost effectiveness was one of the early selling points for cloud’. Accenture tempers this finding with the promise of ‘jam tomorrow’. The move to the cloud involves immediate costs but not instant savings. These will come from future tweaks to the business involving modernizing to a ‘cloud-native mindset’, using ‘FinOps’ and a ‘Continuum Control Plane’ to provide ‘transparency’ and manage today’s ‘complex IT environment’. ‘As complexity increases, so too can cost if these critical elements of the value equation are missing’.

While the move to the cloud certainly involves more complexity, I’m not sure that this was very clear up front. Wasn’t the idea to get rid of all that costly in-house IT and benefit from the economies of scale that the cloud providers could offer? Instead we have a labyrinthine stack of technology with a host of experts required to keep the show on the road.

So where does all this leave OSDU, the oil and gas industry’s big push for cloud deployment? I emphasize oil and gas as OSDU started out firmly anchored in the subsurface and, despite subsequent scope creep, its current deliverables are mostly well-focused. That’s OK. What’s not so great is the way the original intent for a ‘a non-competitive API and data store**’ is in danger of being captured by the cloud providers themselves as in the ‘OSDU Data Platform’ on AWS and Microsoft Energy Data Services ‘enterprise-grade, cloud-based OSDU Data Platform’***.

What is perhaps most curious about this state of affairs is that the end user seems to have been somewhat forgotten. If you are a geoscientists sitting in front of a workstation running Petrel, Geolog or DecisionSpace do you actually care about any of this?

* With regard to cloud regulation see our coverage of the ongoing ‘battle’ between Microsoft and the EU elsewhere in this issue.

** Johan Krebbers 2019 interview in Oil IT Journal.

*** There are other offerings, from IBM, from IBM and AWS and a ‘Simple OSDU instance on Google Cloud from EPAM.


2022 Esri EU Energy conference

Forget the PUG, now its "Energy". BP - Matlab for demanning. GIS at TotalEnergies OneTech. Exprodat integrated windfarm planning. BP’s "Golden Build" pipeline system. Esri Geoanalytics engine. GIS in drilling surveillance. Takatoa’s quantum GIS!

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Paradigm now AspenTech

Emerson floats new AspenTech venture with Paradigm inside. Emerson engaged in take-over battle for National Instruments.

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2023 Open Source Experience Paris conference

Craft AI explores explainable AI (XAI) open source libraries. Thales Inner Source Stack (TISS) community.

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Software, hardware short takes

Upstream: ThermoFisher Avira/Pergeos, Ikon Science RokDoc/Curate, Beicip-Franlab Open Flow Suite Petrosys PRO, Ceetron ResInsight. Operations: SLB ProcessOps, Teledyne FLIR, Honeywell Alarm Performance Optimizer, Total Valve LiftTrack 2.0. Downstream: Ensyte Gastar, KBC Multiflash, Whip Around Wallet, Halliburton Envana.

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Aveva World 2022 San Francisco

Schneider/Invensys, Aveva, OSIsoft consolidate. AI, digital twins and (perhaps) the industrial metaverse. Shell on the "world"s most comprehensive" digital twin and the Energy Transition Hub. Wood, "put a digital twin in your project budget". Eneos - refinery data consolidated to 3D model in Aveva Connect. ExxonMobil "RED" - data-centric engineering. Devon reduces emissions with AI, RPA and the cloud. BP"s ACE digital twin. Plains all-in on enterprise pipeline system, "OT needs to own the PI System". Accenture - oil and gas "leader of (poor) digital maturity field". Aveva"s industrial metaverse underwhelms. Microsoft Bonsai PoC "infuses" portfolio with AI.

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Folks, facts, orgs

CO-LaN, AFL, Billington Process Technology, Black Bay Energy Capital, Bluefield Geoservices, Chemical Safety Board, Carbon America, Cognite, Colonial Pipeline Company, Continental Resources, CybeReady, Dataiku, Delek Logistics, Environmental Protection Agency, Eliis, ExxonMobil, Flotek Industries, IOGP, MacGregor, Object Management Group, Opportune LLP, Pason Systems, Paxon Energy and Infrastructure, Quorum Software, Resoptima, Schneider Electric, Texas Railroad Commission, Velo3D, W Energy Software, Williams, MIT, LF Energy, Object Management Group

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Sales, partnerships, deployments

Sales from: Ovarro/KXCit to Beijing Gas, Omnira to Apache Corp. MoU between Azuli International and AGIG. Partnerships between: Barco/GCCD, Barco/SkySoft, CGI/SAP, Emirates NOC/Comarch, Davisware/Pump and Meter/Zahl, DeepOcean/Akvaplan-Niva. Sales: Flowserve to Aramco, Honeywell to PTTEP. Partnerships: Koch and Percepto, Texas RRC and Groundwater Protection Council. Sales: Lummus to Zhangzhou Chimei Chemical, Emerson to Petronas. Partnership: Resoptima with Aker BP, Sval Energi and NORCE. Sale: Rockwell/Sensia to Petrobras. Partnerships: SLB/Cognite, Seeq/IT Vizion/Vertix/BKO Services. Sales: Technip Energies to Adnoc, Beacon Offshore to Trendsetter Engineering, Windward to US "supermajor", iRely to Corrigan Oil.

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OSDU Update

OSDU at The Open Group. Plans for 2023. How "open" is the "open" subsurface data universe? M15 Release and the geospatial consumption zone. OSDU and the incumbent data stores. OSDU in retail (?!?)

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FOSA fiber optic innovations

Hifi Engineering’s Deep Fake leak simulator builds test data for pipeline monitoring. Febus and Lytt team on well monitoring.

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Done deals

Automation-X MBO. Blackstone IH buys Sintemar Roteq. CGG sells US land seismics to Bon Ton. Chevron leads Svante Series E round. Cognizant to acquire Utegration. Corrosion Resistant Alloys acquires PipeSearch. Forum Energy Technologies executes sale and lease-back. Hexagon AB acquires LocLab, Projectmates, Qognify. CIC/Draeger lead Kuva Systems’ Series A round. LongPath Series A led by White Deer. Profet AI Series A. Pason Systems and Intelligent Wellhead Systems. Progress acquires MarkLogic. Seadrill acquires Aquadrill. Siemens buys Vendigital. Wa'ed Ventures (Aramco) buys into Terra Drone. Vertice acquires MorphPackers assets. VistaVu acquires Quintel SAP practice.

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Standards stuff

IOGP JIP33 Quality Requirement Specifications. Eclipse Foundation’s Sparkplug 3.0. PPDM floats AFE project, signs seismic MoU with Blockchain for Energy! Velo3D/IMI 3D print to API spec. Galileo HAS GPS operational. OGC Metaverse Work Group. OPC UA for CCS. SPE updates PRS for unconventionals. XBRL enters disclosure fray.

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A short history of e-commerce in Equinor

In-house specialist explains how the Norwegian major’s e-business has evolved over the past 20 plus years.

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Regulatory

New pipeline information from Canada Energy Regulator. EPA rules to eliminate gas pneumatic devices. New Mexico approves Flogistix sniffer technology. RRC: natural gas supply chain, Texas Open Data Portal, revised injection seismicity response. EU: GAIA-X cloud and "epic battle" with Microsoft. NSTA on new CCUS data regs. NSTA and Global Underwater Hub on "golden opportunity" for offshore UK.

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Namur Module Type Package and O-PAS

German standards body’s Profibus-hosted MTP architecture parallels ExxonMobil’s Open Process Automation work.

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CO2 transportation app

OLI Systems digital chemistry for CCS. JV with Veolia targets digital transformation of refining.

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Robotic inspection rounds

Namur position paper sets out requirements for autonomous mobile robots that perform safety tours, leak detection and perimeter monitoring.

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Honeywell fined for Petrobras bribery

Honeywell UOP to pay over $160M to resolve foreign bribery investigations in US and Brazil.

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