Downstream
Digitalization
Digital strategies
for refinery operators

Downstream
Digitalization

Table of contents

Digital strategies for refinery operators

Introduction....................................................................................................................................... pg. 3
Production optimization: maximize throughput by ensuring operational excellence................ pg. 4
Current processes make assets run inefficiently, consuming significant resources.......... pg. 4
Optimize production processes to maximize plant yield........................................................ pg. 5
Smart maintenance: get a closer, smarter look at your maintenance activities......................... pg. 6
Operators lose money and degrade equipment life with outdated maintenance activities.. pg. 6
Increase equipment efficiency and life with a pre-emptive approach to maintenance....... pg. 6
Digital worker: boost field workers’ health, safety, and productivity............................................ pg. 8
Monitoring everything at industrial sites................................................................................. pg. 8
Empower field workers by giving them access to data........................................................... pg. 8
Conclusion......................................................................................................................................... pg. 10

About Cognite©COGNITE 2023 — COGNITE.COM

2

Cognite is a global industrial SaaS company that
supports the full-scale digital transformation ofasset-heavy industries around the world. Our core
Industrial DataOps platform, Cognite Data Fusion®,enables data and domain users to collaborate toquickly and safely develop, operationalize, andscale industrial AI solutions and applications.
Cognite Data Fusion® codifies industrial domain
knowledge into software that fits into your existing
ecosystem and enables scale from proofs ofconcepts to truly data-driven operations to deliver
both profitability and sustainability.
WHY COGNITE DATA FUSION® →BENEFITS FOR YOUR TEAMS →CONTACT SALES →Introduction

Unexpected refining outages have soared in recent years, surpassing 2,000 incidents in 2019,quadruple 2015 levels, according to Industrial Info
Resources, a provider of industrial process andenergy market intelligence. Cognite’s solutions
can help operators monitor asset integrity, anticipate unexpected shutdown, and boost plant uptime with a state-of-art root-cause analysis system powered by physics-guided machine learning.
Strategic investments in digital tools and systems
WHY COGNITE DATA FUSION® →Cognite helps liberate the data from siloed systems — such as historians, control systems, andvarious ERP systems — and contextualize it foreasier creation and deployment of analytics models and business applications powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning. Cognite
creates a digital representation of a company’s
operations by connecting all of the IT and OT data
together. With contextualized data as a service,downstream operators no longer need to collect,clean, and contextualize data for every new data
science project. This enables companies to scale
beyond pilot projects and create solutions thatgenerate real value, from more robust and reliable machine learning applications for optimization and automatization to human-facing applications such as advanced visualizations.
Liberating and contextualizing data expands theapplications of advanced analytics, which cansignificantly improve our understanding of how
plants work by revealing hidden bottlenecks andsolving complex problems. Cognite’s interdisci-

BENEFITS FOR YOUR TEAMS →CONTACT SALES →plinary team, which includes people with morethan a decade of experience from operating refineries, as well as experts in process engineering, instrumentation, automation, and optimization, is perfectly positioned to help downstream
operators identify and unlock unrealized value.
This paper explains how Cognite’s products canhelp operators and plant owners accelerate fieldforce effectiveness, optimize plant production
efficiency to reduce the cost of operations while
increasing refinery throughput, and plan and carry out effective maintenance and inspection activities while gaining much deeper insight into asset integrity.

3

Digital transformation presents a game-changing
opportunity to improve yield, productivity, asset
reliability, and workforce effectiveness. Refiners
need to sharpen their digital capabilities in three
critical areas: analytics in production, field force
effectiveness, and asset management.

support cost reductions and production optimization, which can help refineries become more
adaptable, responsive, and competitive in a shifting landscape. To stay competitive, companies
need to embed digital capabilities in all aspectsof their operations in order to improve efficiency,
reduce costs, and protect revenues and margins.

©COGNITE 2023 — COGNITE.COM

Large-scale digitalization of the downstream
sector will only be possible if companies make all
the data they collect available in a way that’s intuitive to human users and machines. However,for many downstream operators, data is trappedin complex, siloed systems. This makes it more
complicated for workers to use the data in their
day-to-day activities; data scientists must build
point-to-point integrations every time they want
to develop a new application, and maintenanceworkers have to access multiple systems to findthe information they need.

Production optimization: maximize throughput by ensuring operational excellence
Investments in data operations (DataOps) platforms and digital tools can support cost reductions
and production optimization, which can help refineries become more adaptable, responsive, andcompetitive in a shifting industrial landscape. To
stay competitive, companies need to embrace digital capabilities in all aspects of their operations
in order to reduce costs, improve efficiency, andbolster revenues and margins.

Current processes make assets run inefficiently, consuming significant resources
Digitalization requires universal access to understandable data — data that has not just beencollected across siloed source systems, butconnected for contextual significance, discovery,
and meaning. It requires a central DataOps platform that allows subject-matter experts to unleash

their creativity, resulting in operationalized digitaluse case execution for better decision-making andstreamlined processes.
Cognite Data Fusion® gives operators that foundational layer, providing a holistic data model that
represents the physical assets and serving as arobust structure to digital twin applications.
Common processes in refineries like crude oil allocation and scheduling require data from manydifferent systems, such as historians, ERPs, laboratory data, specification sheets, and more. The
process of feeding the data into software or a
proprietary algorithm requires a lot of manual workby a skilled worker. Since the process isn’t automated, it consumes significant resources andcarries the risk of manual errors.

Further, downstream operators have highly coupledprocesses that require predictive control. Realtime optimization presents an opportunity to run
plants optimally, stabilize plant processes, and help
make them more agile.
Running a downstream asset continuously at maximum efficiency and effectiveness isn't an easytask. Operators have to apply their subject-matter
expertise to manually ingest data, run experimentsby tweaking variables and seeing the impact on
asset performance, and make decisions based on
the results. This is time-consuming work, and there
is no guarantee that the asset will be operating at
its maximum efficiency.

WHY COGNITE DATA FUSION® →BENEFITS FOR YOUR TEAMS →CONTACT SALES →“DataOps is the ability to enable solutions,develop data products, and activate data forbusiness value across all technology tiers from
infrastructure to experience.”©COGNITE 2023 — COGNITE.COM“DataOps is a collaborative data management
practice focused on improving the communication, integration, and automation of data flows
between data managers and data consumers
across an organization.”

4

What is Industrial DataOps?

Cognite Data Fusion® was built to tackle data quality monitoring challenges and make data readily
available for computation. Liberating and contextualizing the data from different sources makes it easy
to perform real-time optimization. Cognite’s digitaltwin technology can be leveraged to combine theliberated, contextualized data residing in Cognite
Data Fusion® with visualizations, simulators, andoptimizers to guide a suboptimally running plant
toward the optimal operating point.
Cognite provides an open, unified asset model
supported by a holistic DataOps framework. With
the help of Cognite Data Fusion® and advanced
analytics it facilitates, assets can consistently
operate at maximum effectiveness and efficiency.
All the data from different systems is easily accessible, making it easy to perform production programming.

WHY COGNITE DATA FUSION® →Together with some of the largest players in oil andgas, Cognite has developed best-in-class intraday
performance logic to reach the full value potentialof production optimization by adopting a continuous, data-driven approach to production performance management. Using insights from historicaland real-time production performance tracking toprovide guided recommendation and access toperformance enhancing advisors, refineries candetect, assess, and act on opportunities for reaching and expanding maximum throughput.
Ready for Hybrid AI. Capturing data and performing advanced analytics on normalized and contextualized data can help refineries, but reaching the
maximum value potential in production optimization requires a hybrid approach. Often the phenomena operators are trying to predict in refineries
are extremely complicated processes, and it is not
given that the available sensors are able to represent the underlying physics. Consequently thepredictions are questionable, and the ability to

BENEFITS FOR YOUR TEAMS →CONTACT SALES →predict outside the range of the training data will
be even worse.
The solution is hybrid AI, a combination of data
science and physics-based modeling. By introducing physics into machine learning models, operators can more accurately predict these complicatedphenomena. Cognite’s products are built to support
the confluence of data-driven machine learning,
physics-based modeling, and virtual simulation toarrive at robust and highly accurate predictions
and recommendations for refinery processes.
LEARN MORE ABOUT COGNITE’S INDUSTRYSOLUTIONS FOR PRODUCTION OPTIMIZATION →5Reduce time to value. Cognite’s products drastically reduce the time skilled workers need toaccess data from multiple data sources, making
the data available via a unified API, feature-rich
SDKs, various connectors, and through dedicatedapplications. This helps free up time, which experts
can then reinvest in activities that generate value.
Automating data collection and cleaning also eliminates the risk of manual errors, increasing data
quality.

Data in Cognite Data Fusion® can power machinelearning models that can predict yield, energy
consumption, and product specifications within
the error ranges defined by experts. Thesemachine learning models can then be incorporated into dashboards to ensure assets continuously work at maximum efficiency, maximizing yield
while reducing energy use and waste, and keeping
assets within their specification limits. Even small
improvements in asset performance can translate
into significant revenue gains.

©COGNITE 2023 — COGNITE.COM

Optimize production processes to maximize plant yieldSmart maintenance: get a closer, smarter look at your maintenance activities

Despite the rise of tools and techniques to enablepredictive maintenance, most downstream operators waste time and money on calendar-based maintenance that doesn’t increase the lifetime of assets.
Calendar-based maintenance of equipment leads
to inefficiencies, as the condition of the equipment
can’t be accounted for in real time, occasionallyresulting in unexpected and costly reactive maintenance and, more importantly, downtime.
Maintenance systems and software rarely integrate with other databases and data sources (suchas physics simulations) to intelligently schedulemaintenance work. Without this contextualized
data from different sources, the systems are unable
to suggest when maintenance is required.
WHY COGNITE DATA FUSION® →As an added wrinkle, maintenance teams are often
tasked with monitoring and maintaining many
machines simultaneously. It can be challenging toaggregate and monitor data across many different
machine brands, models, etc. Even with machine
data, “alarm fatigue” often overwhelms the teams,
leading to reactive decision-making. Furthermore,
there are examples of equipment specific to refineries that simply can’t be fully monitored throughlive and historical data alone. For instance, suboptimal reboiler operations caused by rapid fouling canlead to large performance losses for refineries andrequire augmented data to facilitate data analytics
and predictive maintenance.

BENEFITS FOR YOUR TEAMS →CONTACT SALES →Increase equipment efficiency and life
with a pre-emptive approach to maintenance
Cognite’s products liberate data from different
source systems and create a holistic data modelwith contextualized data that helps plant operators optimize how they conduct maintenance of
their critical equipment. This results in increased
throughout, less unplanned downtime, improved
maintenance planning, and reduced costs. By
moving to a more data-driven approach to maintenance, Cognite’s customers are also able to reduce
their energy consumption, as healthy equipment
requires less fuel.

Here are some examples of how Cognite’s solutions can improve maintenance activities:
Scalable pump performance overview. In one
specific use case, Cognite created a pump performance dashboard with all the relevant data that acompany’s first-line support engineers require to
do their jobs, including pump performance (bothreal-time and historical), events related to thepump (e.g. work orders), and estimated time until oilchanges based on runtime. This solution enabled
the company to extend the lifespan of its centrifugal pumps by 20%, improving planning and reducing
waste by taking a more proactive approach to main-

6

Operators lose money and degrade
equipment life with outdated maintenance activities

Yet downstream operators already collect massive
amounts of data about their equipment, including
vibration and temperature measurements for theequipment body, shaft power consumption, andfluid measurements such as flow rate, pressure,and temperature. However, refineries often lack an
enablement layer that integrates data from disparate sources and correlates it to failure events. Even
if the refinery tries to manually get these insights,
the process of integrating and standardizing datafrom different sources typically involves a considerable amount of time and effort from skilled workers— time which could have been invested in carryingout the actual analysis.

©COGNITE 2023 — COGNITE.COM

With easy access to data that flows freely acrossthe organization, operators can make informed
decisions about where to prioritize maintenanceinvestments, maximizing plant performance andextending equipment life. Cognite’s products canhelp operators and plant owners plan and carryout effective maintenance and inspection activities while gaining much deeper insight into asset
integrity.

Oil separation quality monitoring. In anotherinstance, Cognite, using the contextualized data
in Cognite Data Fusion®, set up an automated root
cause analysis system that improves oil separation
quality monitoring. The system, built by Cognite's
WHY COGNITE DATA FUSION® →Maintenance prioritization. To streamline maintenance and inspection activities for an operator, Cognite built an application that aggregatesalarms across all machines and applies custom
rules so that the operator’s maintenance team
could easily identify hot spots and prioritize actions
based on severity, duration, interruption, and morein a 3D interface. With better marking and collection of data, the application further refines decision-making, providing more reliable estimates on
the time needed to fix issues and which machines
have reoccurring issues, which helps maintenanceteams optimize maintenance campaigns. Visualcontextualization of SAP maintenance data drastically reduces time spent planning maintenance

BENEFITS FOR YOUR TEAMS →CONTACT SALES →work orders, increases efficiency, and democratizes access to data that experts can use toincrease equipment performance.

LEARN MORE ABOUT COGNITE’S INDUSTRYSOLUTIONS FOR SMART MAINTENANCE →7

Hybrid ML-powered reboiler monitoring. Cognite
products help monitor reboiler health by identifying operational conditions that influence the heattransfer coefficient degradation rate of reboilers
and predicting when maintenance is recommended
or required. Using hybrid ML — a combination ofdata science and physics — to predict when toclean the reboiler, and machine learning to estimate reboiler heat transfer coefficient degradation
over time, Cognite greatly simplifies the integration of data from physics simulators to enrich theanalysis in confluence with live and historical datafrom different sources. In one example where thissolution was implemented, engineers found they
had enough lead time to plan maintenance activities in advance, helping the company avoid downtime. The solution can also be applied to many othertypes of equipment to give a holistic picture of whenthe equipment might need maintenance. This canincrease production, optimize refinery operations,and boost uptime.

and a customer’s subject-matter experts, uses alive hybrid ML model to identify bad actors of poor
oil separation and provide recommendations for
how to improve the separation process. By comparing the suggested bad actor with relevant data,
end users can validate whether a component isa true bad actor and perform mitigating actions
accordingly. This enables engineers to better plan
production, as they can change settings to reducethe chance of quality-related problems before theyarise. The oil-water separator analysis systemhelped boost the uptime of the plant, and increased
the equipment’s efficiency and throughput, saving
the customer an estimated $9 million a year. Thisis a scalable solution that can be deployed using
Cognite Data Fusion® to gas-oil separation plants(GOSPs) struggling with crude oil quality.

©COGNITE 2023 — COGNITE.COM

tenance. With Cognite Data Fusion®, the company
was also able to scale these dashboards acrossmultiple pumps with minimal effort and make thedata readily available for internal or external use.

Digital worker: boost field workers’ health, safety, and productivity

Refineries tend to have a huge backlog ofmaintenance orders, and operations andmaintenance teams usually perform a risk
assessment of the complete set of tasks planned
for the following day to ensure work can be executedsafely and efficiently. Data about work permits,
operational risk assessments, and temporary
deviations are stored in separate systems, meaning
members of the team spend much of their time
before and during meetings on accessing andcompiling information that is not readily available.
Due to the sheer size of refineries, uncertainty
about where specific equipment is located, andWHY COGNITE DATA FUSION® →A single maintenance task may require an onsite
operator to access several separate systems
to get the required data. Sometimes they must
request additional permissions to get access.
Too much time is wasted hunting for information
across many different systems and printing it out
for use in the field.

in building custom extractors for each data source.
These challenges are born out of rigid dataarchitectures that were not designed with an
open, holistic view of enabling data utilization formodels and applications. The good news? Rigid
data structures can be fixed with Cognite Data
Fusion®, which creates holistic data models thatcan be accessed through APIs, high-quality SDKs,
connectors, and plugins to help operators use
the applications they find the best suited to theirneeds.

In addition to technological obstacles, there is thehuman element. Factors affecting risk exposure
and planning such as a deviation that was observed
during the day — a spill or a piece of equipment
emitting a strange noise, for example – has to
be entered manually in today’s system, meaningthat someone has to remember to include it, or tobring it up during meetings. Given the amount ofwork, complexity, and sometimes limited system
support, it is possible that safety concerns could
slip through the cracks.

Empower field workers by giving themaccess to data

Without a unified enablement and integration
layer, the relevant contextualized data can’t
be accessed from one place. Integrating datafrom different sources requires personnel withspecialized skill sets along with a major investment

For Aker BP, one of the largest independent oilcompanies in Europe, Cognite’s products havehelped increase plant workers’ safety while
increasing their productivity.

BENEFITS FOR YOUR TEAMS →CONTACT SALES →Cognite’s products help liberate data from siloed
IT and OT systems, and contextualize it for easiercreation and deployment of analytics models andbusiness applications. With contextualized data
as a service, downstream operators and workers
no longer need to collect, clean, and contextualize
data for every new data science project or new
business application.

8

Limited access to data limits field
workers’ productivity while exposing
them to greater risks

inaccessible data, maintenance workers spend
unnecessary time traveling back and forth
between different locations and have a skewed
representation of the actual risk related tomaintenance activities.

©COGNITE 2023 — COGNITE.COM

The key driver to workforce enablement isequipping operators with updated, contextualized
data that reveals insights into operations andempowers them to make data-driven decisions.
Workers can collaborate across installations
and coordinate more transparently with othercolleagues, and refineries can optimize theplanning and execution of day-to-day operations
and maintenance activities by using real-timedata to quickly identify equipment in its digitaland physical contexts.

InField. In one example, Cognite fed data from work
permits, leaks, barrier impairments, well integrity
status, noise levels, and more into Cognite Data
Fusion®. Cognite’s developers then made this data,
as well as 3D models and equipment tags, available
to field workers in InField, Cognite’s flagship Digital
Worker application, in order to help the company
speed up visual inspection and testing of various
equipment.
InField runs on top of Cognite Data Fusion® and isaccessible on computers and mobile devices. The
application enables engineers and technicians to
instantly access all live sensor data and historic
equipment performance data with less than one
second delay, find essential documentation (e.g.,
procedures, work orders, drawings, P&IDs andmaintenance logs), interact with 3D models of
installation and equipment, share pictures andnotes with their crew, and use computer vision tolocate equipment tags and automatically provide
related information.

In another example, Aker BP used data in Cognite
Data Fusion® to improve its maintenance routines
for process shutdown (PSD) valves. By giving
field workers the ability to see equipment tags incontext with other information — specifically, 3Dmodels of the equipment — Aker BP was able toreduce annual maintenance checks by 66% andcut the time of an average maintenance session
by 50%.

LEARN MORE ABOUT COGNITE’S INDUSTRYSOLUTIONS FOR DIGITAL WORKER →WHY COGNITE DATA FUSION® →BENEFITS FOR YOUR TEAMS →©COGNITE 2023 — COGNITE.COM

9

Aker BP used InField to boost worker safety bygiving its offshore management team a clear
overview of factors that affect safe execution of
upcoming maintenance tasks. The application
boosted awareness of risk factors and reduced
time spent preparing for meetings by combining
data about work permits, barrier impairments,
leaks, noise levels and asset integrity status.
The solution also helped the company fulfill its
regulatory responsibilities and expedited risk
assessment during meetings.
CONTACT SALES →Conclusion©COGNITE 2023 — COGNITE.COM

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Cognite’s solutions help downstream operators
run their refineries optimally, maximizing yield, minimizing waste, and automating simulation data
usage for accurate operations and forecasting.
With Cognite Data Fusion®, operators can maketheir data do more, unlocking new opportunities
and new ways of working to make their production
faster, safer, and more sustainable.

WHY COGNITE DATA FUSION® →BENEFITS FOR YOUR TEAMS →CONTACT SALES →Want to know more about our product?

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