How 5G, cloud, and IoT is changing the Oil and Gas industry

Every day more than 2.5 exabytes of data are produced worldwide, and by 2020 the entire digital universe is expected to 44 zettabytes, which is more than 40 times more bytes than there are stars in the observable universe.

The exponential data growth is also visible in the Oil and Gas industry. For instance, a single drilling rig can generate up to 10 terabytes of data every day, but less than 1 percent is ever analyzed and used for decision-making. The digitalization of the Oil and gas industry remains elusive.

The challenge is not just about capturing data that is collected from connected equipment and assets, but about generating actionable insights from the data. While the industry has been historically good at instrumenting rigs and storing data in large-time series databases, there have been significant challenges utilizing this data for decision making. Bain & Co. estimates that better data analysis could help oil and gas companies boost production by 6 to 8 percent.

Until today, the real challenges for improving the way that data is utilized in the Oil and Gas industry has been related to the:

• Geographical nature of the business,
• The access to ubiquitous high-speed internet and
• Not enough real-time computing power to process this information.

For instance, most oil rigs operate in remote areas using low bandwidth satellite connections to communicate and transfer data to a central data center or remote monitor sensors. A low bandwidth satellite communication link could take more than one week to send a single day of data from the rig to the data center. Also, the latency provided is not low enough to process sensors information and take a decision on a real-time basis.

IoT is the new gold

Oil and Gas operators have been utilizing IoT to increase operational efficiency, secure assets, and achieve regulatory compliance throughout the entire value chain. These solutions enable operators to remotely monitor a multitude of data points such as pressure, volume levels, flow rates, temperature and operating status and conditions of various equipment at well sites, tank farms and pipeline facilities. A combination of wired and proprietary radio solutions is typically used for communications between sensors, controllers and systems, although cellular and satellite are increasingly used for non-mission critical monitoring applications.

At the end of 2018, the installed base of wireless devices featuring cellular or satellite connectivity in the oil and gas industry amounted to an estimated 1.3 million units. Berg Insight forecasts that annual shipments of wireless devices featuring mobile or satellite connectivity for oil and gas applications will reach 325,000 units in 2023. Remote monitoring of tanks and industrial equipment in the midstream and downstream sectors comprise the most common uses for wireless solutions in the oil and gas industry.

All these sensors produce a large amount of data that requires to be processed, analyzed, and stored. To handle the massive increase in the amount of data, companies have turned to expensive high-performance computing centers, and are building out data science expertise in-house, or engaging data science partners. Oil companies now run some of the most extensive private supercomputing facilities in the world. For instance, BP recently built an HPC center with more than 3.8 petaflops of computing power and 23.5 petabytes of disk space, with a total investment of $100 million focused on processing seismic imaging and hydrocarbon exploration data.

The challenge: How to connect all the pieces?

Oil and gas operators need to find a way to get the insights they need from data, despite the fact, their equipment may be remotely operated, have an intermittent network connection, or be in a location where bandwidth costs are high.

When compared to the level of automation present in other industrial and capital-intensive industries, such as manufacturing and automotive, the oil and gas industry has space to improve. These industries have digitized multiple aspects of their business through the holistic application of digital technologies. The opportunity for oil and gas companies, now, is to leverage new technology paradigms like 5G, Cloud computing, and IoT to unleash the value of data for decision making.

Moving the cloud to the Edge

Most oil and gas operations are located at remote and often distant geographic areas, but now moving cloud computing capabilities to the edge will create an excellent opportunity to gain business insights that can increase operational efficiency and profitability.

With the massive growth of sensors, the amount of data to be collected and analyzed will increase rapidly. While Cloud computing can help to overcome some of the challenges of handling large volumes of data effectively, these still rely on data being transmitted, and with many offshore sites working on satellite communications at a speed of around 1Mbps, this will not be feasible. In that sense, a logical solution would be to deal with that data as close as possible to where it is generated. Edge computing is rapidly becoming an essential tool in the industrial internet of things. A new form of distributed cloud computing is bringing the intelligence close to the rigs, where sensors and machines operate. It offers the promise of getting the right device data in real-time to drive better decisions and control industrial processes for improved efficiency.

Cloud and Edge can create a new type of distributed architecture for Oil and Gas. An edge solution help to manage critical workloads onsite while other less critical data can be handled on cloud servers. The bandwidth and the associated costs are reduced, as not all raw data is sent to the cloud. Finally, latency can be improved as critical information can handle at the edge and does not rely on a cloud connection. Finally, reliability is improved because it is possible to operate even when the cloud connection is interrupted.

The oil and gas industry generates a massive amount of data, and with the proliferation of sensors, and this is only going to increase. The challenge for the industry is how they can extract actionable business insights from this data that can enable their operations to run more efficiently. Leveraging artificial intelligence with edge computing in IoT applications transforms this data, to deliver real-time operational information directly to the people and places where needed.

However, Cloud computing is more than just providing a hybrid compute and storage architecture to the Oil and Gas industry. The vast amount of computing power that can be applied to data via machine learning and Artificial intelligence brings new opportunities across the supply chain.

1. Enhanced Exploration with Machine learning: Being able to improve exploration and model reservoirs mean increasing hydrocarbon recovery. Being able to utilize machine learning and mixed reality to assist with data interpretation significantly enhances the effectiveness of finding pockets of hydrocarbons in reservoirs.
2. Improved field planning leveraging on AI: Capturing a massive amount of data across different points and leveraging on AI and big data analytics tools can help operators to their topology for production and injections wells. In this way, companies can become more accurate and faster in finding hydrocarbons moving from months to hours.
3. Drilling Optimization using Big Data analytics: Big data analytics can provide significant improvements in optimizing production areas with geo-steering recommendations reducing drilling time months to days.
4. Reduce production downtime via Data visualization: Technologies like AI and Machine can help operators to be aggregate and visualize the data to minimize downtime and reduce equipment failure end to end and with a high level of accuracy.

5G Private communications networks

The rapid adoption of 4G wireless communication technology and the evolution of 5G standard to cover industrial use cases will bring more significant opportunities for deploying private LTE and 5G networks in the Oil & Gas industry.

A private 4G/5G network differentiates from a public one it is built for a specific use case; a local network that uses dedicated radio equipment to provide service to a limited area. Compared to narrowband networks such as TETRA or P25 for their voice have been built to deliver robust data connectivity, low latency, and high reliability. Also, with 5G becoming a reality, more spectrum is available. 4G/5G quality of service can be configured, and different priority levels can be applied to IoT, mobile broadband, and mission-critical communications.

As 4G is the dominant technology used for commercial mobile service, a private 4G deployment will benefit from all the investment, innovation, and cost efficiencies that come from economies of scale. The open 3GPP 4G and 5G standard mean that infrastructure and devices can be sourced from several suppliers so that budgets can handle with no major vendors due to proprietary equipment. A future-proof, private, LTE network can be the foundation of how Oil and Gas operators can maximize the benefit from the emerging 5G upcoming evolution as operators can identify and incorporate each critical advance as it becomes available.

Also, with recent specification work done by 3GPP to standardize push-to-talk, video, and data over 4G/5G and use unlicensed spectrum gives firm support that 5G will meet the critical requirements of mission-critical applications.

4G and 5G enable oil and gas operators to build an industry standards-based broadband, non-line of sight (LOS) wireless networks that extend the reach of communications for exploration, transportation, and production. 5G will provide broadband speeds with quality of service capabilities that enable real-time communications for critical monitoring, control, and automation. It will so offer an ultra-reliable broadband radio access network that can support the bandwidth-intensive video and data applications needed to improve the efficiency of upstream, midstream, and downstream operations, and mobile edge computing for low latency data processing in real time.

IoT is revolutionizing Oil and gas

Although the oil and gas fields are highly over-instrumented less than 50% of those sensors are not connected internet. If the Oil and Gas operators can capitalize on the insights it already has into operations on the ground, and consolidate the information that exists at each field site into an aggregated data analytics platform, they could improve their efficiency dramatically.

Integrating advanced data analytics and AI driven actionable insights into operations is vital for achieving the digital oil field. Operators need to focus on translating analysis from IoT sensors into data that can be used by field engineers and technicians, making technology accessible and simple to use by everyone.