Back in 2010, when Anne Luise Procida joined Ørsted, oil and gas was the biggest part of the company. All has gone now as Ørsted, a poster child for the energy transition, now operates some 7.5 gigawatts of wind energy with another 2.3 GW under construction. Ørsted’s GIS team provides cradle to grave support of offshore wind farms, from planning and bidding to development and operations. Procida proudly states that ‘we are the spider in the middle of the web’. She works with other teams to gather data and define geospatial standards that will be used throughout the project lifetime. The usual geo-data issues are omnipresent and necessitate data quality and geodetics to assure accurate ‘as-built’ documentation at handover. During operations, GIS informs asset integrity activity (cables exposed, seabed integrity issues) and MRO*, with Esri tools, notably ArcGIS FieldMaps. Ørsted has been working in the USA since 2015 with a string of acquisitions. The US lacks industry standards for offshore wind. These would help in collaboration with contractors and governments. Many US consultants use CAD or Google Maps making it hard to exchange data. There are also many overlapping US data sources. Procida reflected on the transition from the oil and gas world to wind to conclude that the power of GIS makes it very transferable. Offshore cables work the same way as pipelines, wind leverages the same data types, and geophysical and geotechnical data is managed with a modified SSDM* model. The same types of collaboration and integration teams are involved across the windfarm lifecycle.
* Maintenance, repair and operations.
* The IOGP Seabed survey data model.
Jamie Lambert (ExxonMobil) described an integrated workflow for decommissioning offshore oil and gas facilities. The offshore Australia Gippsland basin has seen 50 years of production. Exxon operates 24 facilities, 1000 km of pipeline and 400 wells. The Offshore Oil and Gas Decommissioning Liability (Australia) report (Advisian 2020) found $50 bn of decom is work needed. A subsea material data register has been created for planning and execution of decom and removal of debris and unused equipment. Data has been pulled from many years’ worth of inspection reports into a single, basin-wide dataset with standard attributes. The system provides simple workflows for non-GIS users. An ArcGIS Online application allows collaboration and offline work. Development started with a spreadsheet, designed by all stakeholders. When finalized, the data was migrated into an ArcGIS Hub host. WebApp Builder and Survey 123 and StoryMaps are also used. A Hub dashboard shows current decom status. Recovery campaigns are based on vessel availability, capacity, etc.. Survey 123 Connect was used to author and report on surveys in real time. A big win was the fact that users are now ‘self-sufficient’.
In an interview with host Sumant Mallavaram, Tony Battle, CIO, Shell Energy Retail traced his own career path from upstream mega projects to the customer-centric downstream. As the industry evolves towards renewables, there is good potential for geospatial professionals to add value. ‘We are here because of ESRI, but the future of data is agnostic’. There is a huge gap in data science in regard of transformations, coordinates systems, and geospatial accuracy. ‘In a world where location is key, there is a great opportunity for geospatial pros to fill this gap’. Today Shell’s geomatics community is focused on geomatics in the upstream. But there are many opportunities in the downstream. Folks need to avoid being ‘trapped in geomatics’ and start to raise awareness and help folks realize something else.
Matt Horn of RPS Group discussed how onshore pipeline high consequence area (HCA) analysis is applied offshore. RPS has been working for a Gulf of Mexico operator to address what happens when there is an incident. This involves marine spill modeling to address trajectory, fate, and effects in an approach that mirrors the PHMSA ‘who, what and when’ approach to onshore spills. RPS’ OilMapLand, developed over 20 years, tracks spills flowing across relief and into waterways to determine HCA/AOI impacts. Onshore trajectory mapping is relatively simple as the relief does not change and there is limited variability throughout the year. But in the offshore environment, currents, tides, waves add significant spatio–temporal variability. Traditional HCA cannot hack it. SMAP, RPS’ spill impact model application provides a stochastic approach, mapping hundreds of scenarios of trajectories, random start dates and wind direction get the most probable trajectory and minimum time to land. SIMAP also computes worst case discharge volumes and affected resources. The outcome determines whether a proposed pipeline route is, or is not, a ‘could affect*’ segment in PHMSA terminology. The tool delivers reports to PHMSA or into a PODS database. Operators use the results in emergency response/clean up training exercises.
* an environmentally sensitive area
In a short LinkedIn exchange after the event, Horn added the following. “The HCA ‘could affect’ designation is typically made at the design phase to set up the regularity of inspections that are used during operations. For on-land pipelines, there are design changes (e.g., re-route the pipeline, add HDD, or increase wall thickness) to reduce the likelihood of an incident (accidental discharge). PHMSA regulates pipelines in the on-land environment (with spill response from EPA, or USCG in navigable waterways). But there’s a transition to BSEE in the offshore (with spill response from USCG) and lots of regulations to work around. This type of analysis is useful for operators to get an understanding of the types of receptors that could be affected, how likely (probability) assuming there is a release, and an understanding of how long it would take (minimum time) to those effects.”
Speaking at the 2021 Esri plenary event, Steven Bjerring traced BP’s geospatial journey from the 2015 global roll-out of OneMap V2.1 (with BP’s ‘Chili’ geospatial workflows) to OneMap 6, released in 2020. Latterly OneMap has seen a massive cloud migration with all OneMap systems moved, and an expansion of mobile apps and use cases. These include change detection of refinery build progress using machine learning, live price tracking at BP and competitor retail sites, global pandemic response solutions and more. OneMap leverages the ‘Citizen Developer’ concept, defined as ‘a person who creates new business applications for consumption by themselves and others, using platforms that have been licensed and approved by BP’. CD is ‘driving innovation, delivery and value from core technology platforms’. One Map was designed from the ground up with the CD model in mind. Configurable apps support web/mobile with an operations dashboard, built with ArcGIS WebAppBuilder. ArcGIS Pro tools and Safe Software’s FME automate, schedule and run data processing, integration and analytical workflows. BP’s citizens still need to follow the rules of the road, watching out for data confidentiality, and must always have a manual work around for business critical functions. CDs should not mess with systems of record or duplicate data. It’s also recommended not to use data from other citizen developed apps! BP’s geospatial technology landscape encompasses plethoric data sources and formats that pass into a constellation of ingestion/data wrangling tools, and on for consumption in OneMap/Esri as wells as other tools like Autodesk, AWS, PowerBI, SalesForce and more. All in all, there are 200+ tools and 2,000+ citizen web apps to choose from. BP is now working toward the ‘intelligent nervous system’ that will embed 5G, new satellite data, a live globe of data, all feeding predictive AI/ML and ultimately quantum computing and ‘human-less AI-driven choices’.
Darron Pustam (Esri) showed how ArcGIS Mission is used to managing field personnel during an incident. Mission is now a single system that streams and logs data including on and off network resources. The ‘all inclusive’ command and control product provides a ‘single pane of glass’ view to create and manage a mission, along with an overview for leadership. The system provides peer to peer communications for responders. Scott Noulis demoed the product in use on a spill at a tank battery. The map provides live locations of workers who can chat and send geomessages of spill locations. A bi-directional mission responder mobile app means that all look at the same data. The system can spin-off spill flow simulations, assign tasks and capture events for regulatory reporting.
Malcolm Ross presented Eavor Technologies’s closed loop geothermal system. Classic geothermal doublet production has not always been successful. ‘Up to 50%’ of such wells are ‘dry’ – i.e. not producing economic heat. Induced seismicity is a problem as is the ‘dangerous high temperature and pressure environment. Eavor’s solution leverages horizontal well technology to drill a family of multilaterals that act as a heat exchanger with the surrounding rock. The system is said to operate at temperatures of ‘from 30°C up to hundreds of degrees’. A ‘siphon effect’ means that the system can run ‘without pumps’. Wells are drilled open hole with a polymer seal. A target bottom hole temperature of 150°C range means that the potential is ‘much more widespread than conventional’. 70% of the world has geothermal potential. GIS risk segment analysis is used to locate optimal sites with respect to geothermal gradient, reservoir thickness and population density.
For the IT-minded GIS folks, Esri has announced ArcGIS Enterprise on Kubernetes as explained in a Trevor Seaton’s recent blog.
The Kubernetes option is part of the 10.9 ArcGIS Enterprise release and
can be viewed as a third operating system alongside Esri’s supported
Windows and Linux options. The Kubernetes microservices-based offering
is said to suit high availability/high throughput scenarios and offers
a streamlined, single script deployment without the need for multiple
setup files or complex configuration of ArcGIS Server, ArcGIS Data
Store, or Portal for ArcGIS. Other Esri resources include Determine whether Kubernetes is right for you and the 2021Dev Summit presentation on ‘Introducing ArcGIS Enterprise on Kubernetes’.
Read the official proceedings from the 2021 PUG here and access the individual presentations here.
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