Insight-Driven Digital Engineering – A Key Enabler Driving Operational Intelligence in the Energy Industry
Authors: Abili N. , Hemeda S. 
Published: October 2023

The energy industry is undergoing fundamental change with industry 4.0 enabling intelligent operations, production optimization, prescriptive maintenance and efficiency boosting, embedding insights, hyper-automation and enhance agility across production assets with the objectives of increasing productivity, delivering cost savings, and improving superior customer experience. Leveraging digital solution accelerators, APIs and network gateways connectivity for event data analytics, these digital native products can expedite development on energy assets with infrastructure as code - the single source of truth. Adopting insight-driven digital engineering is crucial for the energy industry to remain resilient, profitable, and sustainable in meeting net-zero carbon emission in the energy transition.

There is urgent need for the energy industry to partner with the digital native companies and integrators to co-create solutions in driving digital enablement across oil and gas, offshore developments, LNGs, renewables, hydrogen, and utilities. The energy industry does not need to reinvent the will, as the technology exist. What is needed is collaborations of ideas and application of disruptive use cases across the digital and energy industry to pivot sustainable novel solutions for the ecosystem. Deployments of autonomous systems with AI for remote operations optimization, IoT connectivity for pervasive platform across assets, digital twin for visibility of entire assets, edge computing for resilience and low cost of operations, data analytic platform for prescriptive maintenance, and the protection of critical infrastructural assets in an ecosystem of vulnerabilities, are key processes for net-zero carbon emission and sustainability in the energy industry. The energy and digital tech leaders must collaborate to revolutionize the energy industry with insight-driven digital engineering in this age of digital disruptions.

Designing for speed in an EPC project without compromising quality relies on digital information from concept and FEED, to inform a digital engineering solution platform, which have resulted in enabling Energy Operators get to a final investment decision up to 45% faster. A typical use case is where an EPC company begun the process of reducing their engineering software and technology portfolio from over 175 distinct products down to less than 32. The benefits include expedited evaluation of concepts through process simulation software, automated plant layout and piping designs through solution accelerators enablement, and coordinated estimates tied to the engineering information. With over 200 digital accelerator models deployed in the first year of an energy operating asset, the solution correctly identified 49 major early warnings, a value of $16.8 million saving in ROI was achieved.

Thus, with support for the entire concept to FEED process now enabled with integrated digital design, layout and estimating software, EPCs can explore and optimize options for both offshore greenfield and brownfield projects quickly and efficiently with solution accelerators, providing Energy Operators the highest value from their investments.