It used to be the PUG, the Esri Petroleum user group. It is now ‘energy’. Esri is following the lead of its major clients and shifting focus to the energy transition. Presentations at the 2022 Esri EU Energy conference covered rooftop solar modeling in Oman (Petrogas E&P) , windfarm siting and design offshore Europe (Exprodat), hydrogen and CCUS (BP) and methane tracking (Enel). In the oil and gas field, Esri technology is applied in drilling, shipping and downstream where it has the potential to displace incumbent technologies. Outside of the energy transition, some are preoccupied with the ‘digital transformation’, with substantial energy expended on the move to the cloud (TotalEnergies). Meanwhile Esri’s already replete product line up has expanded further, adding a large choice of AI/ML platforms and tools to GIS users who now should be a match for specialists in the ‘data science’ department.
Stephen Hogg explained how BP’s GIS department is supporting the UK’s energy transition, supplying front end concept delivery teams with a ‘citizen developer’ toolkit to integrate multiple engineering and feed contractors and ensure that projects are based on up to date offshore and onshore data. One example is a North Sea oil and gas de-manning dashboard that uses a Matlab model to forecast weekly activity, leveraging a ECMWF* weather data via a Plotly low code Python server. The system plots time charts and figures the best times to pull people from the ‘3M’ (Morgan, Morven and Mona) offshore wind development. An animated 3D display includes bathymetry. Hydrogen and CCUS also ran in this, a spin through of BP’s ‘We’re backing Britain’ campaign.
* European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts.
Camille Jaganathen and Veronique Miegebielle presented TotalEnergies GIS activity. This is conducted from Total’s ‘OneTech’ technical unit, said to be the motor of its transformation to become a ‘major player in the energy transition’. Of the 3,000 plus OneTech personnel, 45 are GIS professionals. Another 170 work across its worldwide geospatial community. A ‘customer success manager’ plays a key role in deployment, assisting end users and managing geospatial projects. CSM success metrics include increased product adoption (nice for Esri!). OneTech acknowledges the help it gets from Esri’s French unit with support for an ArcGIS implementation portal, and help on specific topics such as TE’s Move2Cloud* program and ArcGIS Velocity roll-out.
* TotalEnergies likes to develop its solutions internally and is working on a major move to the cloud, building a shared digital platform hosted across Azure and AWS.
Chris Jepps presented Exprodat’s comprehensive approach to siting a windfarm, leveraging some esoteric ArcGIS Pro functionality. Designing a wind farm involves the sea-bed environment, wind characteristics and electrical cable layout considerations. These factors are ‘usually considered in isolation’. Exprodat advocates integrated planning using ArcGIS Pro to combine spatial analysis, 3D visualization and network analysis. Exprodat’s ArcGIS Pro toolkit models the wake patterns for different turbine layouts using a the ‘industry-standard’ Jensen method. Full details of the 2021 study are available as a blog posting on the Exprodat website.
While Exprodat’s use of Esri technology is very inventive, there is likely an additional step involved in windfarm design. Computational fluid dynamic calculations similar to this evaluation of a cycling peloton show how wind ‘shadows’ can be extremely complex and impact energy output. More on wake modeling here.
Graham Savage presented the migration of BP’s ‘Golden Build’ (GB) pipeline system of record from PODS* 5.2.3 to PODS 7, both of which leverage the Esri-flavor of PODS**. BP’s PODS 7 GB has been designed and built around Esri’s technology, notably with ArcGIS pipeline referencing and ArcGIS Pro. The migration and design of the new tool was performed in-house by BP’s GIS team to ‘allow BP to take control .. and become experts in our own data and model’. An ‘agile waterfall’ approach involving SparkSystems’ Enterprise Architect was used. Savage concluded praising the ‘beauty and simplicity’ of PODS 7.
* Pipeline open data standard.
** Note that PODS is not exclusively Esri-focused. From the PODS website we read, ‘PODS can be accessed and used by multiple vendors and software platforms. [ … ] PODS is GIS‐platform independent, meaning it can work with Esri, Intergraph, or any other GIS software.
Scott Noulis (Esri) presented the ‘new’ ArcGIS Geoanalytics Engine* (AGE) that adds spatial analysis to a big data environment, extending Apache Spark with SQL functions and analysis tools. The Geoanalytics Engine comprises a Spark plugin and a Python library. Databricks middleware allows the AGE to run in all three clouds, Azure; AWS and Google. Noulis also presented ArcGIS Knowledge, Esri’s graph technology offering. A slide of a full stack of all of the above looks rather intimidating. What is not so clear is what the AGE/Knowledge combo adds to ArcGIS’ already copious out-of-the-box geoprocessing capability.
* Presented before at the 2016 Esri PUG.
Jean-Michel Amouroux (TotalEnergies) showed how GIS is encroaching on yet another upstream domain: drilling and well monitoring. A WebGIS application has been developed to allow drilling events to be shared in-context between multiple stakeholders. The solution was developed for offshore Nigeria drilling operations and shares near real-time information on reservoir extent, losses and completion zones. A combination of ArcGIS referencing and event processing locates such information along the deviated well trajectory. Information is shared by both web and ‘physical’ maps for use by drillers, asset teams and geologists. The system was assembled in ‘under two weeks’.
Finally a heads-up for a 2022 Esri Developers Conference MapGallery presentation by Roland Degelmann (Takatoa) on what happens when ‘Quantum Artificial Intelligence Meets GIS’. Degelman has worked on dashboards for the 2021 German Bundestag election and the CumbreVieja eruption in La Palma, Spain. Quantum AI is claimed to generates business-relevant insights from space- and time-dependent data. Takatoa’s solutions are implemented in ArcGIS and apply ‘various quantum algorithms’ to big geo-data. As actual quantum computers are still very much work in progress, it’s not entirely clear when the its ‘commercial impact’ will appear. ‘Although the exact timing is unknown, the resulting commercial value is likely to be enormous. It is estimated to be in the hundreds of billions of dollars’.
Visit the ESRI Events page for (some) of these presentations. The next Esri Energy Resources GIS Conference is scheduled for April 26–27 in Houston. More from Esri.
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