Analytics for an Edge: Optimizing Operations in the Energy Sector
Blog: The Tibco Blog
The energy economy has been patchy in 2016. Engineering innovations in drilling and completions have been enormously successful, leading to a glut in crude supply. Cheap crude has led to increased fuel production, and refinery margins are narrowing.
When margins are low, successful companies are increasing their focus on technology innovations and running a profitable business. This results in more attention on planning and operations issues like where to drill, what rigs to operate, which assets to acquire or divest, and how to run the business to optimize production, sales, marketing, and profit.
The use of analytics is fundamental in keeping profits up and maximizing returns. There has never been a better time for energy companies to sharpen the saw on their data infrastructure and analytics deployments.
How can data and analytics help?
From upstream exploration and production to refining and logistics, trading, downstream fuels, and marketing; there are opportunities for optimization. Innovative companies are using analytics to manage asset portfolios, maximize production, address environmental health and safety, monitor equipment, and streamline logistics, sales, and marketing.
All of these areas benefit from business insights and dashboards for measurement and diagnosis, embedded reporting, collaboration, predictive and streaming analytics, and process automation. One key path to extreme value is extracting insights from historical data “at rest” and putting those insights into action on fresh data “in motion”. This applies to data refresh rates that are daily, hourly, by the minute, second, or even sub-second in some applications.
Consider production optimization as a use case. With careful interconnection of systems and application of analytics, a production manager can be physically sitting in Houston, monitoring thousands of wells around the world from close-to-real-time feeds of equipment sensor data.
Based on the sensor data stored in historian systems and integrated with advanced analytics tools, that manager is able to visualize patterns and leading indicators for equipment stoppages that the analytics team has developed. The analytics patterns can be simple rules like changes in pump intake pressure, or more flexible empirical models; forming leading indicators to failure conditions such as gas buildup in the downhole, plugged tubing and the like.
These patterns can then be used to monitor refreshed equipment sensor data in real time, to anticipate when and why a potential equipment issue may arise. These potential issues can be communicated to responsible engineers for intervention, and managed in a collection of accumulated intelligence on the equipment for convenient ongoing assessment, maintenance, and production optimization.
This is the industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) in action, and the energy sector continues to be a technology and business leader in this area.
TIBCO’s insight to action platform and the industrial Internet of Things (IIoT)
This rapid insight-to-action data refresh and analytics workflow is enabled via an Enterprise Software Insight Platform— combining systems integration, data management, analytics, collaboration, and event processing components.
TIBCO’s insight-to-action platform features interconnected data, systems, and analytics—that enable the analyst and manager experience. This platform can underpin a company’s intelligent operations with comprehensive data management and analytics logic.
TIBCO’s platform combines TIBCO Spotfire and Streambase for visual and streaming analytics; along with TIBCO EMS, Business Works and Open Spirit for messaging and integration, including data connectors for specialized data sources in the energy sector; and TIBCO Tibbr for collaboration and crowdsourcing throughout field and management teams.
TIBCO Spotfire is widely used in the energy space across upstream exploration and production, asset management, supply chain, trading, refining, and downstream fuels and marketing. Spotfire has a large install base in the Energy sector – used by all the majors, across all functional areas, and by most exploration and production companies worldwide. Spotfire also has a healthy ecosystem of partners and system integrators specializing in the Energy Sector.
While simple to use, Spotfire is deep in GeoAnalytics and Predictive Analytics, including the industry’s only embeddable commercial R engine, TIBCO Enterprise Runtime for R (TERR), and advanced mapping capabilities.
TIBCO is also strong in streaming analytics and event processing. TIBCO Streambase, a streaming analytics platform that utilizes a visual programming paradigm to apply math to real-time data streams, is used for equipment maintenance, management of non-productive time (NPT), well operations and real-time drilling applications. TIBCO BusinessEvents, a stateful, event-driven rules platform, allows organizations to quickly build event analytics applications with real-time logic and reasoning. These analytics applications may be configured with an in-memory data mart like TIBCO Live Datamart, combining rich real-time visualizations with continuous queries and user-driven alerts, actions, and responses.
The TIBCO insight-to-action platform enables equipment management and production optimization in real time and builds institutional knowledge identifying the kind of equipment components with issues, regions impacted by those issues, and any consistent bad actors in the system. This Enterprise Platform forms a digital nervous system across the field equipment, technical, and management staff, providing notifications and alerts to the appropriate engineers who can take action to keep the oil and gas production flowing.
TIBCO’s 14th annual Houston Energy Forum
The TIBCO Houston Energy Forum brings together hundreds of data management and analytics professionals in the energy sector for 2 days of technology innovation and sharing. Themes for 2016 include Operational Excellence, Strategy, and Technology—with presenters from leading energy companies across the US.
The latest and greatest updates from TIBCO Spotfire, Streambase, and Open Spirit are featured on the program, including new geoanalytics, graphics, data discovery, and predictive analytics features, templates, and data functions. Day 1 features customer and TIBCO technical presentations, and day 2 includes training and a Hackathon for Spotfire users. Some of the technical material is being published to the TIBCO Community—for use in the Hackathon and to extend the reach of the forum. See below for links to the material in the TIBCO Community:
TIBCO Community – Spotfire Community WIki
In these times of low margins, innovative companies are accelerating their digital journey. From upstream exploration and production to refining and logistics, downstream fuels, and marketing, there are opportunities for optimization. Innovative companies are using analytics to prioritize asset portfolios, maximize production, address environmental health and safety, manage equipment, and streamline logistics, sales and marketing. It’s the surest path to competitive technical and business process, operations, and profit in the current environment.
Join us for 2 days of agumenting intelligence for energy professionals at the Houston Energy Forum. Find more information and register here.
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