Together to innovate

The present challenges are about daily operations. How can we secure safe, reliable, and effective production on our facilities at lowest possible cost? Securing production includes monitoring activities, making necessary and optimising adjustments, perform ordinary maintenance, prevent unforeseen incidents, preparedness and any emergency response.

Historically Equinor’s value creation took place on a few large offshore platforms on the Norwegian continental shelf with local control. Since the future will be many small units spread all over the world, you probably think like us; we need to perform remote operations and both automise and robotise as much as possible. You might also think, like us, that a huge growth in robotisation and automation, sometimes alongside with humans, needs to be orchestrated somehow. To help us here, we have built digital twins of our facilities both topside and subsea. These are pretty cool 3D models of all our equipment, but as of now, these are all static visualisations.

You don’t need to spend much time behind the joystick on games like Fortnite or COD/Warzone to understand that gaming is a dynamic flow of real-time images and information offering the gamer the opportunity to both establishing an overview and see necessary details – real time. Based on this information flow, the gamer chooses a strategy on which both immediate actions (like shoot or hide) and longer-term capacity interests (like ammunition and nutrition storage) are taken care off.

How can the energy industry learn from gaming to take the next step in safe, sustainable and cost-effective remote operations of offshore energy production, whether it is activities above sea level (Challenge 1) or subsea (Challenge 2)?

How can you contribute to solve this challenge?

Challenge 1: Digital operational support topside

A game-like tool where humans, drones, robots and general automation are working coordinated together for a best possible output; valuable energy to the world.

Some important tasks for such a tool would be

• Keeping humans in the loop in control rooms for execution of operations (e.g. Human-Machine Interface, Human-Machine Teaming, simulation tools)
• Energy consumption and fleet management of systems/tools in use whether for the new energy mix or for a drone fleet (mission objectives/energy optimisation)
• Use for scheduling and simulation, employing sensors and real time monitoring to avoid incidents harming people or equipment or even causing large potential accidents
• Training tool (or how to make an educational curriculum for future users).
• Planning and execution of operations
• Operate the tasks and energy optimization processes from shore (remote operated)

Challenge 2: Digital operational support subsea

A game-like tool where classic vessels, remotely operated vehicles (ROVs), autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), robots and general automation are working coordinated together for a best possible output; valuable energy to the world.

Some important tasks for such a tool would be

• Integrated operation of topside and subsea production facilities, wind farms or any onshore installations
• Use of visualisation tools for monitoring and remote control
• Use of gaming technologies to improve human interaction with robots (avatars), installations, and environment
• Subsea communication and coordination via global systems (satellites)
• Reduce the need for larger support vessels