CTG Helps Large Oil & Gas Co. Create Efficiencies With Digital Twins

CTG Digital Twins Solution Helps Large Oil and Gas Company Create Efficient Information Enrichment Process 

Our client is a premier international corporation specializing in the procurement of natural oil and gas. Established over a century ago, the organization has expanded its reach to encompass operations across 13 nations, all while maintaining a steadfast commitment to the efficient and productive exploration and extraction of oil and natural gas.

Challenge

The client, a natural oil and gas company, specifically focuses on the extraction and processing of oil, including onshore planning, inspections, and maintenance work for offshore drilling platforms in the North Sea. Transportation of employees to and from these platforms is very expensive and involves safety risks, and often, repeat trips are required to fully understand the state of the facility. The organization previously engaged a vendor to make a digital copy of one specific platform through laser scanning and 3D model creation, but upon inspection, they discovered that their employees were unable to use the digital copy effectively. They needed a different version of a Digital Twin application that would allow employees to efficiently perform work planning.

Solution

CTG determined that the client’s existing 2D plot plans and isometric pipe diagrams could be processed so that the identification numbers unique to each asset in the facility were assigned a spatial location. Doing so would introduce an added layer to the existing Digital Twin models, tying virtual locations to the appropriate asset tags.

No single technological solution was available to transcribe the asset tags, so CTG developed a manual process as a proof of concept (PoC). To allow for continuous innovation, the PoC was subsequently refined with programmatic automations resulting in an end-to-end, adaptable solution for associating text from 2D documents with a searchable 3D location. This approach reduced as much as 80% of the project’s total cost compared to competing solutions.

Additionally, AWS Virtual Machines were used to quickly and temporarily spin up the required hardware to process 3D models and point cloud data. In conjunction with AWS, Amazon Workspace was configured to reduce manual processing time and costs by over 50%.

After the information enrichment process was created using intelligent automation, 2D documents that were previously manually searched for and processed could now be found in 3D context with a simple search in the Digital Twin. This resulted in significant time savings, reducing overall workflows from nine hours to 30 minutes (95% time savings), and delivered more efficient work planning procedures, improved business performance, and an enhanced user experience.