Shell’s Deepwater business has selected Bentley Systems’ digital twin approach to streamline its capital projects process and accelerate time to first oil
With a plan to deliver several subsea tie-back projects over the next 10 years, Shell Deepwater Projects has recognised a significant opportunity to accelerate capital project delivery and cut project delivery time by implementing an integrated digital project and engineering environment. The solution spans project conception in the early phase design through to handover.
“Shell Deepwater Projects is developing an integrated Workflow and Data Platform from system selection to asset handover to streamline our capital projects processes and accelerate time to first oil,” said GT Ju, general manager Gulf of Mexico Deepwater Projects.
“The platform is being developed in partnership with Bentley leveraging Bentley’s iTwin open, scalable Azure cloud-based platform which provides interoperability across owner and supply chain systems. We believe that an end-to-end platform that gives us visibility and transparency to Project and Engineering data across our portfolio will be a crucial driver to delivering competitive projects.”
Nicholas Cumins, chief product officer – Bentley Systems, added, “Bentley’s iTwin platform is ideally suited to providing aligned, secure and visual access to project data across the supply chain and capital projects ecosystem. Shell’s selection of Bentley’s iTwin platform validates our open approach to digital twins and underscores the ability of the platform to scale to the largest, most complex capital projects and dynamic engineering use cases.”
In addition, Bentley Systems is providing investment funds to FutureOn, a Norwegian software company supporting deepwater subsea projects, to accelerate going digital within the oil and gas industry. The investment sets the stage for FutureOn and Bentley to deliver the next-generation digital twin technology required for oil and gas ecosystems to manage and analyse data, integrate with existing systems, provide analytics visibility, and rapidly explore ideas collaboratively.
FutureOn will combine its award-winning field design application (FieldAP) and its API-centric collaboration platform (FieldTwin) with Bentley’s digital twin platform (iTwin) to advance user organisations like Shell Deepwater. Both FutureOn and Bentley platforms use open web standards to facilitate complex integration and customisation, and the combined offerings are already being implemented in exploration and production workflows for the creation and curation of subsea digital twins.
According to FutureOn CEO Paal Roppen, “The Bentley Acceleration Fund investment is a significant milestone for FutureOn and will help drive the growth of our business by advancing the FutureOn technology as well as extending our reach.”
“Today, digitalisation is more important than ever for the oil and gas industry as challenging market conditions persist. Innovative and disruptive digital twin technologies such as those we develop alongside Bentley will help farsighted organisations like Shell Deepwater to improve project and asset performance,” Roppen added.
