GE Digital Twin Technology Revamps Offshore Oil Operations

The oil and gas digital asset transformation has been gaining momentum for some time with its drilling modernization projects via so many exploration and production companies in the western United States. The updates have focused on asset management technology platforms for large shale fields and especially on remote monitoring for devices like pumps, valves and other instruments to provide real-time maintenance opportunities.

One example of this approach with a twist is Noble Link’s use of GE’s Digital RigSM solution for a recently announced offshore application on the company’s Noble Globetrotter I drilling vessel. GE describes Digital RigSM as a way to “combine data models from a digital replica of physical assets, known as a digital twin, along with advanced analytics to detect off-standard behavior, providing an early warning to operators to mitigate a problem before it strikes.”

For this particular application, the remote monitoring is being done by GE’s Industrial Performance & Reliability Center for predictive analytics.

“As the digital twin continues to acquire information, we will be able to learn from analytics results, which will shed new light on maintenance effectiveness as well as help us explore other possibilities to further improve drilling efficiency in marine settings,” Andy McKeran, general manager, GE’s Marine Solutions.

The Digital Rig solution uses GE’s Predix IIoT platform and the platform targets to all the control systems, including the drilling control network, power management system and the dynamic positioning system.

For an industry like oil and gas, operational optimization has been an incremental process with new automation approaches and new work processes. In the video above, Jason McMullen, maintenance mgr for Noble Drilling discusses the benchmarking of assets, the mountains of data and more context as they use GE’s digital twin platform.

>> For more of the press release form GE, see “GE and Noble Link up the World’s First Digital Rig.“