Eyeing a brighter future of O&G at GE’s iCenter

With the declining oil prices, players in the oil and gas industry have been forced to re-evaluate the way they run their businesses. Operational efficiency is especially crucial to O&G companies. Now, more than ever, it is clear that the Internet of Things has a principal role to play in the future of businesses and digital solutions could hold the key to this future.

GE Oil & Gas’ iCenters provide digital industrial solutions to maximise operational efficiency and minimise downtime. The iCenters are where the digital world and human expertise meet. Big data is securely moved from remote locations to the iCenter’s database, where advanced analytics constantly check for deviations from expected behaviour and experienced diagnostic engineers work with GE’s clients to keep their assets at the highest level of reliability and availability possible.

 

 

GE operates three iCenters globally in varying time zones – Florence, Houston and Kuala Lumpur – to ensure maximum efficiency as the diagnostics engineers rotate between shifts seamlessly to provide 24/7 monitoring of more than 800 O&G assets around the globe. Gionata Ruggiero, TMS Service Engineering Manager for GE O&G, highlighted that the iCenter only houses top talent with a wide array of expertise skillsets.

“In Kuala Lumpur, we built an iCenter last 2013 where our diagnostic Engineers (Front Line) monitoring and analysing the data from all our clients’ assets.

It is difficult to find people to be seated here, as the challenge is to find people with a wide range of skills. Besides an engineering background, they should have some field experience, good communication skills and ability to work under pressure,” he said.

Ruggiero said that a typical workday would start at 7am and end at 3.30pm, when a handover is conducted to the next iCenter. However, such a routine is luxury in his books as he regularly stays back with fellow engineers to discuss potential issues and mitigate potential crisis before they happen.

 

 

“We are not only acquiring data. We look for problems and prioritise those which are more critical. From our diagnosis, we are able to early identify the issue before it becomes a problem so we give time to eventually send the right specialist to the field to fix the problem,” he said.

Ruggiero explained that the right talent is crucial as marginal oversights or errors in the O&G industry can impact production impact generating hundreds of millions of dollars per year. He added that O&G technology is already very advanced, and only the best experts can push the boundaries of its efficiency.

“We’re talking about technologies so advanced they’re already running at somewhere in between 95 to 97 per cent of reliability. We’re talking about making these incredibly advanced machines, more reliable than they already are. With the iCenter, these technologies could see an increase in reliability.”

 

 

While the exact amount of unplanned downtime mitigated varies from case to case, on average, the iCenter helps avoid operational interruption at least once per week. Last month, a client managed to avoid eight hours of unplanned downtime because the system caught a deviation in the data pattern. That’s eight hours of potential revenue loss mitigated.

For O&G companies, reducing operation downtime could tip the scales (of economy) in their favour. Each week a LNG site, losses in revenue could reach millions per week.

 

 

“The bottom line is, through the use of big data, we can predict patterns in the long term for solutions to issues that have not yet manifested. We have the ability to identify and calculate when a machine might malfunction in the future, saving millions of dollars in revenue losses from unplanned downtime. By looking at today’s data, we are able to see tomorrow’s potential issues. In some ways, technology now is so advanced, we are afforded a glimpse into the future,” said Ruggiero.