Digital Oilfield is the concept that combines business process management and digital technologies. Systemic technology automates workflow and maximizes productivity. The overall risk of the oil and has operation is optimized via this technological development. The competitiveness and sustainability associated with the oil and gas industry are expected to increase with the inclusion of digital oilfields.
The performance of an oilfield can be is replicated via a digital twin that is typically designed to upgrade the upstream sector. The technology aims on improving the attractiveness of the oil and gas sector by converging information technology and operational technology. The integration of ICT-based solutions into industrial processes is hereafter expected to optimize the output associated with the manufacturing system. A digital oilfield is used mainly used in a low oil price environment. Digital Oilfield technology is an amalgamation of IoT (Internet of Things) as well as AI (Artificial Intelligence).
Digital Oilfield technology enables information to be relayed from onfield operations to remote locations. Therefore, human interference within refineries is expected to reduce marginally owing to the growing adoption of digitalization. The technology allows users to gather, analyze and perform operations based on the information collected by the network of IoT-based sensors.
Advancements in technology, sensing and connectivity, and data analytics have provided an impetus to the growing digital oil field technology. As per research, rapid adoption of this technology was witnessed in the past 15 years. A rise in requirement for workflow automation and digitalization within the oil and gas sector is expected to boost the growth associated with this market.
Digital Oilfield Technology allows the end-user to obtain productivity gains via an improved reservoir understanding. The remote monitoring of other operations such as drilling is also expected to bolster the automation trends within the oil and gas sector. However, digitalization within refineries is limited by a lack of well-defined workflows and processes. Data capture from all production assets is further complicated by the dependence of legacy systems, as well as remotely scattered oil and gas fields.
The end-users, i.e, the oil and gas companies as well as the service providers constitute the overall digital technologies market. Companies like BP, Shell, Chevron, and Equinor are some of the end-users for digital oilfield technology. Oil-field service providers such as Schlumberger, Halliburton, Baker Hughes, and Weatherford have been trying to develop the process optimization issues within refineries via increased investment in R&D.
The inclusion of this technology is expected to bolster output, and subsequently, reduce operational costs. This is mainly because of the reduced maintenance cost incurred due to the unplanned shutdown of process equipment.
Challenges faced by the Oil and Gas Industry
The Bimodal age distribution of the workforce is regarded as one of the key ongoing challenges within the Oil and Gas Sector. Several high complexity tasks are associated with a high operational cost. Therefore, digital oilfield technology replaces the existing manpower employed for certain operations with digitalized solutions that increases the overall process efficiency.
Future Trends within the Digital Oilfield Chemical Market
Some of the key foundations to achieve digital oilfields are planning, designing, and applying these solutions to develop inexpensive and automated alternatives. Remote monitoring solutions help oil and gas producers visualizing their operations through real-time sensing. This in turn reduces the number of on-site operands marginally. In terms of safety standards, as the number of operators on-site reduces- the safety associated with each employee within a plat operation also increases.
The rapidly increasing pace of digitalization and the introduction of Industry 4.0 is expected to be one of the key drivers for this market. The inclusion of these industrial aspects is expected to launch new opportunities and challenges within this market. For instance, procuring usable data from instrumentation wells and facilities was regarded as a market challenge. This was predominantly due to the heavy volumes of data relayed by a system of sensors and computational devices within a process.
The start of the data revolution constructs new types of models and data-driven proxy models that enable engineers to understand and predict system behavior. This is mainly because trusted physics-based solutions are time intensive or non-existent in case of certain data-driven design complications.
Automation is expected to be one of the key industry trends. The proliferation of digitalization is anticipated to entirely automate manufacturing processes within the chemical industry. Oilfield chemical industries are exceedingly adopting solutions that increase the optimization rate within industries. On performing a trade-off study, it is seen that automation-based solutions reduce OPEX associated with an operational process.