SLB on 1 May announced a collaboration with Rockwell Automation, Sensia, and Cognite to create digital capabilities for floating production storage and offloading (FPSO) facilities of the offshore industry
SLB said this partnership will improve the reliability, availability, safety and efficiency of these critical assets — all while lowering the carbon footprint of their offshore operations.
Steve Gassen, president, production systems at SLB, said, “SLB will bring advanced digital solutions, subsurface domain expertise, and complex integration and project management capabilities to scale up efficiencies and lower the carbon footprint of operations across every stage of the FPSO life cycle.”
To improve performance efficiency for FPSOs, the alliance will integrate the full data life cycle with focused automation, analytics, simulation, and visualisation tools. This ultimately will lead to reduced risks of equipment failure and unscheduled downtime, increased safety, optimum equipment utilisation and energy consumption, as well as more informed strategic decision-making.
Dr. Francois Laborie, executive vice president of strategic projects at Cognite, said, “We have proven from the North Sea to the Gulf of Mexico, that we can enable true scale and the operationalisation of use cases in FPSOs with Cognite Data Fusion, delivering simple access to complex industrial data.”
Petrobras has hired SLB to create and deploy a control system and a dynamic process simulation solution. Sensia, the top control system and automation specialist in the oil and gas industry, and Inprocess Technology and Consulting Group, are collaborating to develop this strategic multipurpose dynamic simulation (MPDS) solution.
Five new FPSO units will be installed in Bzios Field in the Santos Basin, and the MPDS solution will take advantage of SLB's experience as an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) and in offshore construction and operations to provide an immersive digital twin environment to dynamically simulate operational processes and their control and automation systems, train personnel, and strengthen safety components.
Yasser El-Khazindar, CEO at Sensia, said, “We bring to the coalition this original foundation, plus the development of specific digital applications and a complete metering solution, from the sampling and measurement skid to the control system.”
