Predictive technology specialists, Operational Excellence (OPEX) Group, are helping upstream operators to increase oil and gas production through the smart application of digital solutions.
OPEX’s unique data-driven approach to maximising production uptime and revenues, known as the X-PAS™ service, makes use of existing infrastructure and data sources to provide asset and production managers with new information about their asset and the ability to predict the future performance of production critical systems.
By combining data science and predictive technologies with the expertise of data scientists and oil and gas domain experts in a very specific way, OPEX can accurately predict how key systems will perform in the short and long term. Potential threats and emerging issues across an entire system can be highlighted far in advance, allowing onshore and offshore teams to make crucial data-driven decisions to protect baseline production, avoid critical system outages and access new levels of production volumes.
Jamie Bennett, CEO of OPEX explains more; “This is a business level solution which is helping oil and gas operators to secure additional production revenue using digital and predictive technologies. Each customer is different, but we typically target a 2-5% improvement in production and a 50% reduction in critical system outages.
“By unlocking the value inside our customer’s data, we provide assurance and help to enable an enhanced way of operating and maintaining specific production critical systems or the asset as a whole.
“A recent OGA report showed that the average production efficiency across the basin has risen from 71% to 73%, so there has been progress in the right direction. However, there still lies a largely untapped opportunity to further improve the performance across the UKCS basin and digital and big data solutions have a significant role to play.
“Although our X-PAS™ service is specifically geared towards the oil and gas industry, a lot of the underlying technologies and techniques we use are commonplace in other industries across the globe such as aviation and manufacturing.
“In these industries, companies are exploiting the value within their data to accurately predict how their systems will behave and ensure they are operating effectively.
“Since 2015, OPEX have expanded out from a single field evaluation with one company to working with a number of leading operators. There are many compelling success stories here to demonstrate that modest investment can yield exceptionally high returns, irrespective of the age or capacity of the asset.”
“To give an example, the X-PAS™ service is in operation on a gas compression system onboard a North Sea platform. 2.5million data points and thousands of relationships are analysed continuously by the OPEX team. Last year we helped this customer to secure an additional $20million in production revenue by prompting 40 crucial interventions that resulted in a 65% reduction in system outages and a number of important safety and performance improvements.
“Ultimately, it’s all about working collaboratively with operators, allowing them to make informed data-driven decisions to improve their business, extend field life and discover new, more effective ways of working.”
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