On March 2 this year, the meeting of the Scientific and Technical Council on “Digital solutions for oil and gas and energy sector” was held under the chairmanship of Uzakbai KARABALIN, Deputy Chairman of KAZEBERGY Association.
The President of the Republic of Kazakhstan N.A. Nazarbayev in his State of the Nation “New Opportunities under the Fourth Industrial Revolution” specified serious challenges and outlined priorities for the implementation of tasks of the country's industry digitalization.
Alan Aralbayev, Director of Information Technologies Department of the Ministry of Energy of the Republic of Kazakhstan, reported on the current status of digitalization of the country's fuel and energy complex. Thus, the Ministry surveyed 47 large enterprises in the supervised industries (electricity, oil and gas, coal and nuclear sectors) on the implementation of industry 4.0 elements. By the results, it was revealed that the majority of companies use industry 2.0, large companies use industry 3.0, and only a few companies have industry 4.0 elements.
Alikhan Baidussenov, the representative of “EmbaMunaiGas” JCS, provided an example of the intellectual field operation. In 2015, “EMG” JSC implemented the intellectual field concept in Uaz field, as a result the field is operating in a digital development mode. The technical solution was developed by specialists and experts of “EMG” JSC and was implemented by Kazakh specialists.
Such work will be performed in other fields, the plans and activities are discussed.
In turn, KBTU, which has all the required resources, offers proven commercial solutions, the implementation of which can directly affect the successful operation of oil and gas companies in implementation of the tasks set for “Industry 4.0” and “Production 4.0” programs. It was reported that the university’s development allows reasoning of the costs for the establishment of Dispatching and Situation Centers, ensuring their effective work, provision of relevant and reliable information for making decisions online. Thus, know-how developments were successfully tested and implemented by “KazMunayGas - Refining and Marketing” JSC in 2016 with the integration, processing and visualization of data of facilities for production, logistics, storage and marketing of petroleum products of the main plants. The purpose of the project is to increase productivity, reduce the costs, improve energy efficiency and environmental friendliness of the plant.
In addition, the employee of General Electric Bulat Abishev told about the digital transformation. He presented a package of solutions for GE digital transformation, performance evaluation, business effects modeling, internal company digitalization (organizational structure and staff) and the project road map. The partners and customers of GE develop applications for internal and external users (based on the Predix platform). According to the speaker, Predix platform helps to develop business: from secure connection of machines and data collection in real time, remote access analytics to the creation of “digital twins” in order to obtain data on past activities and future results.
Representative of “Huawei” company presented an overview of ICT solutions for the oil and gas sector. According to Akhmet Tussupov, the use of Huawei technologies ensures an increase in production by 5-10%, improvement of oil recovery by 3-7%, OPEX reduction by 15-20%, reduction of incidents on labour protection, industrial and environmental safety by 50-80%. The company provides services for 60% of the 20 largest oil and gas companies and maintains 38,000 km of oil and gas pipelines in 45 world countries.
Vyacheslav Baushin, Deputy Director of “Alstrontelecom” LLP, told the participants of the Scientific and Technical Council about “Zhuldyz” software complex that was developed in connection with the emerging need of Kazakhstan Oil and Gas Institute to obtain the software that would replace expensive foreign products. It has been reported that the company's software solutions are developed taking into account the remarks of subsoil users and help to solve 100% of the tasks of simple fields and 90% of tasks of complex fields, which is sufficient for production units and cover all the essential needs of oil producing companies.
Summarizing the meeting, Arman Satimov, Advisor to KAZENERGY Association Chairman, noted that even now the leaders of digital transformation are 26% more profitable on average than their competitors. The economic effect of digital solutions will be 4-12 trillion dollars, and more than 70% of them will account for B2B (business-to-business) solutions. According to statistics, 87% of financial directors agree that the growth requires a faster data analysis and only 12% of companies are able to respond to information inflow in real time. The meeting on this direction is held for the first time and therefore proposals for the development of digital solutions in oil and gas and energy industries are expected.
In general, the discussion of digital solutions for oil and gas and energy sectors became of interest to all the meeting participants. Upon the completion, the Chairman of Scientific and Technical Council noted that these projects and issues are relevant today and have a great prospect for further development. The implementation of such projects in oil and gas sector will improve the level of business processes automation and will reduce operating costs in production.
