Special Report Oil & Gas 4.

Special Report Oil & Gas 4.0

Oil & Gas industry Add to myFT

AI sensors
Find Oil & keep fuel
Gas industry flowing
stories easily. at Europe’s largest refinery
Start your feed.
Advanced equipment can detect problems 75 days before they occur

Pernis Refinery, Rotterdam © Ernst Bode/Shell

Share Save

Nathalie Thomas in Edinburgh YESTERDAY 6

At the vast Pernis refinery in Rotterdam, where Royal Dutch Shell processes 20m
tonnes of crude oil a year, any glitches or unplanned downtime can be costly.

The equipment and operating conditions at Europe’s largest refinery are monitored
using 50,000 sensors that generate 100,000 measurements a minute.

Last year Shell started using machine learning to better analyse and process that data.
The model was designed to predict failures in control valves, and it allowed workers to
carry out maintenance or adjust operating conditions as needed.

Advertisement

The work at Pernis is an example of how oil and gas companies use artificial intelligence
and machine learning to notice problems before they occur, sometimes months in
advance. Shell has since expanded the programme to 19 assets.

“In just the first two weeks after deploying this [model at Pernis] . . . we think we
prevented two trips with benefits of about $2m,” says Alexander Boekhorst, vice-
president for digitalisation and computational science at Royal Dutch Shell.

“What we have seen in Pernis is notification periods [of potential failures] from four to
75 days. Sometimes, well in advance, you can see something happening that wouldn’t be
possible to observe with the human eye or conventional computer systems.”

While machine learning and the concept of predictive maintenance have existed for
decades, sharp falls in the cost of cloud computing have led to a change in how
companies can create value from data, according to Ed Abbo, president and chief
technology officer at c3.ai, an artificial intelligence software provider.

“What we can do is basically look at the entire history of failures and the signals leading
up to those failures and train machine learning algorithms on years of history,” says Mr
Abbo, whose company is working with Shell as a partner.

“You might have a system that has been in operation for five years or seven years and it
might have failed in a number of ways. You’re taking all the empirical data on how that
system performed and was maintained, technician notes, parts replaced or refurbished,
geological data, operational data, weather data, etc, and you are training algorithms on
prior failures and then using those algorithms to anticipate failures with sufficient
notice to avoid production or drilling disruptions.”

Sensors used in predictive maintenance, which have been around since the 1950s, have
not only become more advanced but cheaper, says Julie McCann, professor of computer
systems at Imperial College London.

“Back in the 1950s you’d have wired sensors,” she says. “Now we have better
technologies to be able to communicate sensor data over wireless. The movement is now
towards wireless because it brings advantages, such as being able to retrofit sensor
systems to devices or machines. It brings the costs down considerably as well.”

Researchers at Imperial have also developed CogniSense, a system that does away with
sensors altogether.

“We have a box that sits in the corner of the room and monitors the machines through
sending just the same radio [signal] that you would have for WiFi through the machine.
We can detect if something is going wrong without even having to touch the machine,”
Prof McCann says.

“You’re sending the radio signal and listening to its equivalent of an echo and then
signal processing that . . . to see how the machine is behaving.

“If it starts to deviate then we can use machine learning to analyse if it is decaying or
something has changed in the machine. We can derive things like the temperature
change.”

While AI and machine learning offer great potential, deploying it at scale is “non-trivial”
and projects need to be selected with care, says Mr Abbo.

Mr Boekhorst argues that companies have to start with the problem they want to tackle,
then work back to the best technology to solve it, rather than looking at where they
could apply AI. To reap the benefits, companies also have to change their way of
working, Mr Boekhorst says. “AI is not a journey about technology only. In fact it’s
much more about ways of working and getting data-centric,” Mr Boekhorst says.

Advertisement

FT Disruptech
London
04 December 2019
Strategies for intelligent growth in a Big Tech
world

Register now Presented by

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2019.

All rights reserved. Share this article Reuse this content

Paid Post

Paid Post by Abu Dhabi National Oil Company ADNOC

Oil and gas drills deep for new digital skills
“STEM talent can play a really impactful role in shaping and enabling business
success”

Oil & Gas industry stories you missed

Analysis Saudi Aramco Nick Butler

Saudi pressure on families complicates Technology can help natural gas stay
Aramco IPO competitive
SEPTEMBER 20, 2019 NOVEMBER 7, 2019

Analysis The Big Read BP PLC

Mexico: López Obrador makes a big bet on BP’s Looney takes oil major into energy
oil transition
OCTOBER 3, 2019 OCTOBER 6, 2019

Explore the Special Report

READ MORE ABOUT THIS SPECIAL REPORT

Oil rig tragedy leads to This decade’s sharp falls in oil and gas
prices demand the best deployment of
improved safety as robots technology to protest profitability in the
sector. The digital revolution is helping
step into breach improve output, recovery rates and
safety through computer modelling,
deployment of drones and other
cutting-edge techniques

Currently reading:
AI sensors keep fuel flowing at Europe’s largest refinery

Is digitisation the fourth stage of the hydrocarbon revolution?

US and EU sanctions take toll on Russian oil and gas exploration

Russia makes its oil reserves work harder as output declines

It looks like a ship, floats like a ship . . . but it’s an LNG plant

Oil rig tragedy leads to improved safety as robots step into breach

Follow the topics in this article

Data mining Add to myFT

Internet of things Add to myFT

Support services Add to myFT

Artificial intelligence Add to myFT

Technology sector Add to myFT

Support Legal & Privacy Services

View Site Tips Terms & Conditions FT Live Executive Job Search

Help Centre Privacy Share News Tips Securely Advertise with the FT

About Us Cookies Individual Subscriptions Follow the FT on Twitter

Accessibility Copyright Group Subscriptions FT Transact

myFT Tour Slavery Statement & Poli… Republishing Secondary Schools

Careers Contracts & Tenders

Tools

Portfolio Enterprise Tools

Today's Newspaper (ePa… News feed

Alerts Hub Newsletters

MBA Rankings Currency Converter

Feedback

More from the FT Group

Markets data delayed by at least 15 minutes. © THE FINANCIAL TIMES LTD 2019. FT and ‘Financial Times’ are trademarks of The Financial
Times Ltd.
The Financial Times and its journalism are subject to a self-regulation regime under the FT Editorial Code of Practice.