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PETROMAKS2-Stort program petroleum

PeTWIN : Whole-field digital twins for production optimization and management

Alternative title: PeTWIN: Helfelts digitale tvillinger for produksjonsoptimalisering og styring

Awarded: NOK 8.0 mill.

Digital twins are necessary for digitalising oil and gas production. Unfortunately, they are poorly understood and hyped. Thus, in 2018, Digital Twins, together with Deep Learning, were at the very top of Gartner Group's well-known hype curve. Put simply, a digital twin is s simulator that tracks the operation of an oil production facility. Modern oil fields are complex, and difficult to operate. This is true in both the the North Sea and in Brazil. Production facilities interact with each other through the petroleum in the ground. Managing these problems needs a digital twin of the entire field. This project brings together academics and production companies in Norway and Brazil to build a research-based best practice for building and using digital twins for field management. This will be done by letting researchers work with current digital twin projects in companies to see how computer science can make digital twins faster, more effective and more reliable. We believe that a shared conceptual model of the production facility is needed to tie together all the information, measurements and models that are needed to build digital twin. Making and using this model is the main research task of this project. By bringing together Equinor and Petrobras in this project we ensure that the results of our work can be applied on different facilities, with different companies in different countries. Researchers from the University of Oslo and UFRGS bring complementary skills in industrial informatics and knowledge modelling to the project. The project will deliver a best practice, summarised in a book, that will enable digital twins in 2024 to be better, larger and more useful than current tools. The project started in October 2020. We have worked in 2021 with building up the project team and indentifying the use cases for each of the partners. We have also mapped the compelex standards landscape for digital twins.

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Digital twins are necessary for the successful digitalization of oil and gas field operations. Unfortunately, they are poorly understood and hyped. This project will provide a much-needed research agenda to (1) work with existing industry initiatives in digital twins for field management so as to (2) develop the methods needed to create a next generation of scalable, maintainable and useful digital twins. PeTWIN links researchers from University of Oslo and Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul with digital twin initiatives in Equinor and the Libra Joint Venture in Brazil. The researchers will work with each company to identify problems in building and running digital twins. We then build a research-based methodology and best practice by applying knowledge representation and semantically enabled data analytics. We will build shared conceptual models of the field management domain and the lifecycle of information in the digital twin. These models wills support current and future petrotechnical applications and allow better governance of data in the digital twins. They also improve data access, support smarter analytical methods and enable new, digital workflows. This use of shared models is the main novelty of this work. We will then prototype pre-commercial tools and software needed to demonstrate these methods. We will also interact with relevant standards organisations (eg ENERGISTICS). Validation will be done through demonstration on diverse use cases provided by Equinor and Libra. This knowledge-building project will be run as a single Norwegian-Brazilian project and devotes substantial resources to knowledge building and dissemination. Each stipend holder will have a long-term visit to the other university and partner companies. Use will be made of internships and master's exchanges. A Norway-Brazil forum will be held each year to share experience and the results of this work will be summarised in a much-needed monograph.

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Funding scheme:

PETROMAKS2-Stort program petroleum