In recent years, Digital Twin has gained the most hype amongst technologies, solving key business issues to unlock an enormous amount of value. In the oil and gas industry, the technology is becoming a major driver of business value. It is able to assist oil and gas companies to optimize the value drivers such as capital expenditure reduction, time-to-first-oil acceleration, production acceleration, recovery rate increase, operating expense reduction, and health, safety, and environmental improvement.

As a digital twin replicates physical equipment or real-world processes in a virtual environment, it gives companies the ability to make faster and better decisions. Oil and gas companies can capitalize on digital twin as it enables unprecedented real-time insights into their operations and upsurge their operational excellence to the next level. It can also be leveraged to simulate virtual scenarios that will ultimately enhance asset productivity, reliability and performance.

The technology allows owners-operators to glean real-time data feeds from sensors in an operational asset to identify the exact state and condition. However, keeping the engineering information and process data about the asset updated at the same frequency is typically challenging for most oil and gas operators.

Also, the gap between the real physical asset and a digital replica can lead to increased risk exposure and suboptimal performance of the asset. And this can pose safety and economic risks to companies if the engineering information and process data are obsolete over several months.

Thus, a comprehensive information management solution with detailed visualization of asset information that allows users to capture, connect, access, visualize and asset data from all possible sources is key to accomplish a digital twin. It enables the users to manage information across the entire life cycle of the plant efficiently.

Improving Prognostics and Health Management

The oil and gas industry always in search of new ways to produce energy at lower costs. This is where digital twin comes into existence, playing a significant role in achieving this goal. The technology can provide prognostics and health management that enables system optimization and predictive maintenance.

It can also provide insights needed to understand the performance of equipment. As companies in this field are accustomed to sensor-based digital twin, the technology takes sensor data and process it through systems simulations and embedded control software that imitate the reactions of the real-world asset.

A digital twin is pertinent to both legacy and new developments in the oil and gas industry. For legacy assets, it can typically enhance industry operators’ understanding of value drivers and hindrances and advance visualization of real-time operations information. Conversely, for new developments, the technology enables companies to make better use of capital and expedite the time to first oil.