ENERGY COMPANIES ARE EMBRACING AI
The industry has moved rapidly from proof of concept to the proof-of-scale stage in terms of digital twin and AI adoption, despite the sector’s traditionally more conservative approach to operational change and data sharing.
Shane McArdle, CEO of Kongsberg Digital and Chairman of the Conference Advisory Board told the conference: “Companies that invested in the foundational capabilities of digital twins or data platforms have been able to take advantage of this technology very quickly as it has scaled up. Those capabilities have allowed us, as an industry, to develop the core capabilities you need to connect something like generative AI to industrial data.”
GENERATIVE AI IS ALREADY BENEFITTING OPERATIONS
Large language models (LLMs) and similar AI developments are helping the industry sift through petabytes of data being generated for digital twins and other uses, much of which would otherwise be untouched given the limitations of human resources. This is providing valuable insights that would otherwise be missed.
“Digital twins provide structure and gen AI allows you to search in a more abstract way than you normally would – it’s critical that the two grow together. Without that, you're going to get to a point where the human aspect is the limiting factor with both the digital twin and the AI,” Justin Piwetz, Asset Management Lead, Research & Innovation in Virtual Technologies at bp, said.
LLMS ARE MAKING DIGITAL TWINS SMARTER AND EASIER TO USE
LLMs help integrate unstructured data for use in digital twins, helping to provide better outputs. LLMs provide context for insights from digital twins, effectively making them more capable and intelligent, and improving the accuracy of predictions. LLMs can make a system behave more like a human, so a person without a technical background can interact with a digital twin using his natural language.
DIGITALISATION REALLY IS HELPING TO BREAK DOWN SILOS
Speakers reported a shift in industry working practices, reporting a more collaborative approach to developing solutions and sharing data. Amit Jain, an advisor on Digital Twin development and deployment at Chevron, told attendees, that the situation prevailing five years ago where vendor applications were working in separate silos and vendors were reluctant to collaborate had been turned on its head.
“The digital transformation has helped us to break those silos. Now, when I'm speaking with partners, they're saying: our solutions are open, we can send and receive data from everywhere. So, it has really transformed how data is treated both within and between organisations,” he said.
SHARING IDEAS – AND DATA – SHOULD BECOME THE NORM
Collaboration both within and between organisations needs to become the default position – it can only improve the prospects for your business. Andrea Course, Digital Innovation Program Manager at Shell urged companies to build on growing cooperation within the energy industry to help speed up the digital transition.
“Collaborate, collaborate, collaborate: pick good partners that will take you along the road that you need to go on. Once you have your vision, find out who can help you,” she told delegates.
INTEROPERABILITY IS KEY, DATA SHARING NEEDS TO BE AS FRICTIONLESS AS POSSIBLE
Interoperability is vital for the industry. For the benefits of data sharing to be maximised, data needs to easily accessible and usable across the diverse range of technologies and applications deployed.
“We need separation of hardware from software, separation of software and data and separation of the AI Model from the platform,” Michael Hotaling, Operations Excellence Digital Manager, at ExxonMobil said. “Data needs to be in a model that can be interrogated no matter what generative AI, or NLP, or LLM you are using. We've got to keep aligned as an industry and get to a modular plug and play approach – the additional use cases we can build on that will absolutely move exponentially.”
SHARED DATA NEEDS TO BE SECURE – BLOCKCHAIN CAN HELP
Blockchain has important uses in an industry where data is being fed through AI applications and increasingly being shared and passed along the supply chain. It ensures that all sorts of data from well inputs to sales information cannot be tampered with, providing encryption and data security, as well as proof of data ownership.
“In your digital twin, for example, you can put your source data into blockchain, making it immutable data that no one can tamper with. You can then trust that data for audit, for payments, for regulatory purposes, for carbon reporting, or for anything else where you need to prove that this is what really happened,” Rebecca Hofmann, President & CEO, Blockchain for Energy, told delegates.
PEOPLE REMAIN THE ENERGY INDUSTRY’S MOST VALUABLE RESOURCE
AI and digital twins are not taking over: they are ultimately intended to help people make better, faster decisions. At the same time, those people are critical to overseeing the integration of AI into operations.
As Jason Gislason, Global Technology Manager at Chevron Phillips, put it: “There's a lot of really good applications for LLMs looking at very specific things, but you want to keep people in the loop, and you want to do it in such a way that that you add value to the organisation, but not put it at risk.”
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