Speaking at the (virtual) Digital Transformation in Deepwater Production Conference organized by the International Society of Automation (ISA), Shell’s Johan Krebbers asked, ‘What is the Role of Standards and Technology in Getting Data Ready for Analytics?’ Proper modeling requires accurate data in an open and adaptable format. Good Models start with good data.
Hitherto, OSDU, as it says on the can, covers a data environment for the upstream. But Krebbers’ presence at an automation conference reflects considerable future scope creep for the protocol (as indeed did Shell’s putative OSDU-based IT for its hydrogen unit – see our last issue).
Developments in the field of sensors, internet of things, AI and digital twins are the next targets for OSDU-style data support. In common with others from the IT side of the IT/OT divide, Krebbers recommends constraining process control technology to where it is appropriate, leaving all the smart stuff (predictive/analytics) to the IT side. Even inside the process domain, the sensor market is developing fast with lower cost, ATEX compliant devices coming from startups. Krebbers recommends ‘looking beyond’ the incumbent process control providers.
On connectivity, LoRaWAN-based IoT can replace locked-down vendor solutions and should become ‘part of the standard infrastructure of every asset’ enabling data collected from any location of an asset to be collected in a cloud-based data platform. All data collected on an asset by your own staff or by a third party should go into your cloud. It is your data. Once all the time-series/event data/video/corrosion data is in a single data store, artificial intelligence can be applied to predict future equipment failure, leverage machine vision for spotting leaks and so on.
So where does OSDU fit into the bigger picture of IT spanning everything from the subsurface to process? Enter the Open Energy Data Platform, a huge expansion of OSDU concepts and methods in support of all of the above, plus digital twins of oil production facilities, windfarms, solar and more. The endgame is to connect all data sources (operational, engineering, finance … ) into the integration and visualization layer of the digital twin.
When is this likely to happen? The OSDU timeline foresees completion of R3, the first ‘commercial release’ in Q1 2021. R3+, planned for mid 2021, adds drilling and production to the mix. By late 2021, early 2022, a hypothetical R3++ release will extend OSDU into the new energies domain and add connectivity to an ‘engineering data platform’ housing engineering/construction data, piping and instrumentation data and more. Krebbers concluded his presentation by evangelizing the approach, ‘Everything is possible. You are only limited by your imagination Think end to end workflows Think database for everything. Just start’!
More from the conference home page.
Comment: As OSDU expands into operations and process, it may start to tread on the toes of the folks in the neighboring The Open Group initiative, OPA-S. Maybe Pedro Vieira (Petrobras) had something with his TOG in TOG suggestion in our last issue.
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