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Autonomous Operations
Autonomous operations: pathway to By investing early in automation, digital and electrification technologies, the oil and gas sector can benefit from reduced carbon emissions, lower costs and safer work environments, according to a recent ABB study. Oil Review Middle East sat down with Johan de Villiers, SVP, Global Energy Accounts, ABB Energy Industries to learn more. YDROCARBONS ARE SET to continue to play a significant role in the energy mix for some time to come to meet the growing global energy demand – but they need to be produced with reduced emissions. Automation and electrification technologies can enable the industry to do just that, as de Villiers explains. “Automation and electrification solutions are some of the foundational technologies enabling energy production, across the full spectrum of energy. And a key sector for us is offshore oil and gas production. “For offshore oil and gas production, you've not only got the challenge of producing energy reliably, but also of keeping people safe and maintaining those offshore assets. So over several decades, we've been working at refining our automation solutions and building digital solutions, that can make those installations more reliable, more efficient, and less dependent on people being present in those sites. What's now changed is that there's now a very strong drive towards more sustainable operations – something that we can enable with exactly the same technology.” De Villiers highlights the encouraging results from ABB’s recent report ‘Energy Transition Equation’ for the offshore oil and gas sector. It finds that automation, digitalisation, and electrification technologies that enable autonomous operations can deliver savings of more than 300,000 tons of carbon emissions per annum for an average offshore site, a reduction of around 25%. This is the equivalent of removing 150,000 combustion cars from the road. It also shows how early integration of technology in new autonomous sites (fixed and floating) can deliver production efficiencies, with annual operational savings up to US$30mn per site. “The ideal case is where we can build this into the project design right from the start, ie design the platform with a view to it being a low man or unmanned facility, so that everything in the design takes that
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Automation and electrification solutions are some of the foundational technologies enabling energy production.” 20
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Issue 2 2023
Image Credit : ABB
sustainability