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EXCERPTS FROM ARTICLES RESULTING FROM THE SEARCH STRING: digital transformation exxonmobil
ExxonMobil Adds Fuel to a Digital Transformation
Scott Ferguson, Managing Editor, Light Reading
11/8/2017
LAS VEGAS -- How far has technology come?
It's projects like these that Brown says is driving an atmosphere of "digital everything," which ExxonMobil and its IT department are trying to embrace.
"Digital everything is not very far off," Brown said. "The ability to relate seemingly unrelated data and draw new insights and to answer questions previously unasked is what will drive value."
source: https://www.lightreading.com/enterprise-cloud/digital-transformation/exxonmobil-adds-fuel-to-a-digital-transformation/a/d-id/738001
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How 'the couch' is supporting ExxonMobil's sprint to digital transformation
Samantha Schwartz for CIO Dive
Published Oct. 29, 2019
ORLANDO, Fla. — Last year ExxonMobil announced plans for "aggressive growth," pushing to double its earnings by 2025 without changing customer pricing.
The ambitious goal forced the oil and gas company to digitally transform, according to Bret McKee, chief technology architect at ExxonMobil, who spoke at the Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo in Orlando, Florida last week.
Over the last 30 years, the company's business model was largely designed around ERP transactions across single lines of business. The 2025 goal forced ExxonMobil to change how it collects and harnesses data insights. Today the company has mandates around APIs and cloud-ready solutions.
DevOps and agile are playing a vital role in ExxonMobil's digital transformation. Because technology was named a key player for its $31 billion goal, the company had to confront the cultural barriers obstructing digital transformation.
While the company is still doing research and development for testing use cases for emerging technologies, like blockchain and quantum computing, ExxonMobil adopted tiered approaches to its digital transformation, including:
   Sprint 1: virtualization and infrastructure management
   Sprint 2: enterprise application architecture
   Sprint 3: automation strategy
   Sprint 4: standard operating environment design
Sprint 4 was dedicated to building a platform only once but using it for multiple use cases. This is where "the U" or "the couch" comes into play, explained McKee.
"The couch" is a diagram depicting ExxonMobil's industry collaboration. The two ends of "the couch" are management and orchestration by VMware on one side and security and trust on the other side.
The "cushions" on that couch are layered with foundational technologies by Intel, then hardware by vendors including Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Dell and Compulab. The next two layers of cushions include ExxonMobil's operating system, in part, built by Red Hat and its workload virtualization by Docker.
Each use case then sits on "the couch."
source: https://www.ciodive.com/news/how-the-couch-is-supporting-exxonmobils-sprint-to-digital-transformation/565947/
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Executives from Dow, ExxonMobil, Audi, Microsoft, and Intel Share (More) Thoughts on Digital Transformation
May 8, 2020
By Paul Miller
ARC Report Abstract
Overview
At the 24th Annual ARC Industry Forum in Orlando, Florida, an executive panel discussion on the digital transformation of industry followed the keynote addresses.
In part 1 of this multi-part ARC Insight, the executive panelists addressed questions related to: organizational silos, IT/OT convergence, supplier support for digital transformation, digital innovation approaches, and overcoming commercial barriers to innovation. Here, in part 2, the panelists share their perspectives on:
   What the plants and factories of the future could look like
   Potential cloud adoption for operational data and solutions
   Strategies for getting workers to accept and use new technologies
   Avoiding the trap of like-for-like technology replacement
   Digital twins in process and discrete manufacturing
digital transformation
Participating in the panel from the technology users’ side were Billy Bardin, Global Operations Technology Director at Dow; Don  Bartusiak, Chief Engineer of Process Control at ExxonMobil Research and Engineering; and Dr. Henning Löser, head of the Audi Production Lab.
From the technology supplier side, were Christine Boles, VP of the IoT Group at Intel; and John Kovac, Director of Microsoft’s Manufacturing business unit.  ARC’s Andy Chatha moderated the panel discussion.
What Will the Plants and Factories of the Future Look Like?
Don Bartusiak from ExxonMobil Research provided a process industry perspective.  “In 2030, we will still be replacing 1980s-vintage control systems.  But the role of the console operator will change; we are going to see more autonomous types of operations.  The types of solutions we deliver to the console operator in broad terms will have more autonomous characteristics.  But beyond the console operator, I think our maintenance staffs are going to be vastly more digitally enabled than they are today.  We're investing heavily in that.”
He also pointed out the company will change the way it does process engineering.  Instead of spreading the company’s engineering talent around at its various manufacturing facilities, much engineering will be performed at an above-site level so its process talent and equipment experts will be able to see the whole fleet, rather than being physically located at one facility and just servicing that one site.
source: https://www.arcweb.com/blog/executives-dow-exxonmobil-audi-microsoft-intel-share-more-thoughts-digital-transformation
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A data transformation in America’s energy frontier
02.22.2019
Welcome to the oilfield of the future, where wells across hundreds of miles communicate with each other and operators can rely on data-driven insights and real-time automation to make faster, smarter decisions.
Often found in remote corners of the world, these fields of the future will rely on a similar digital network that everyday consumers count on – like smart home thermostats and mobile banking apps, which help limit energy use and drive more productivity.
In the Permian Basin, one of America’s most bountiful unconventional fields, ExxonMobil engineers and Microsoft programmers are working on a digital transformation that will maximize output from ExxonMobil’s more than 1 million acres of operation, making this the largest-ever oil and gas acreage to use cloud technology.
“There is ripe opportunity for the energy industry to transform how we leverage our data flows,” said Anish Patel, ExxonMobil’s Permian technology integration manager. “What was possible 10 years ago is nothing like what we’re doing today, and that trend of rapid innovation will only exponentially accelerate going forward.”
The suite of Microsoft digital tools will allow field operators to collect loads of data every second, which can be analyzed by onsite operators, engineers and researchers across the country. Sensors will be able to deliver real-time data, like pressure and flow rates from wellheads, to cloud computing solutions that can run thousands of computations per second, allowing for quicker analysis of production.
“Microsoft is focused on the business outcomes of our customers, with customer success as a top priority for empowering organizations to achieve more,” said Kate Johnson, president, Microsoft U.S. “Our partnership with ExxonMobil has the potential to transform the energy industry in how to leverage data to increase and maximize production.”
Ultimately, the partnership with Microsoft is expected to generate billions of dollars in value over the next decade, driving capital efficiency and increasing production by up to 50,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day by 2025.
source: https://energyfactor.exxonmobil.com/projects/global-activities/a-data-transformation-in-americas-energy-frontier/
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ExxonMobil and Intel collaborate on open industry standards technologies
by Jonathan Greig in Digital Transformation on December 18, 2019
Innovating internal systems at Exxon inspires executives to create a forum for the oil and gas industry.
The latest installment of Intel's Customer Spotlight Series highlights the work done by teams at ExxonMobil to modernize the technology they use and to note the creation of the Open Process Automation Forum, a consortium created to address long-standing challenges with industrial control systems.
Bartusiak elaborated further on ExxonMobil industrial control systems, which he said was rigid and vendor proprietary. While this allowed for greater controls, he said, it was a huge barrier to innovation and became one of the fundamental business problems the company had to address.
He laid out all of the technology the company is now adopting to streamline its industrial control systems, which include greater use of wireless technology, 5G, IoT, cloud systems and artificial intelligence.
"We're aggressively pursuing wireless tech in manufacturing, both for wireless connections to sensors or final control elements, which are things like valves that change the rate of flows of fluids. This is also to enable a digital, mobile workforce," Bartusiak said.
ExxonMobil, he said, was eager to adopt this technology but had to make sure cybersecurity issues were addressed first due to the sensitive nature of their industry.
"In an industrial control context, cybersecurity is a very real concern for us. We're talking about risk to life, risk to our neighbors who live near our manufacturing facilities. We take that responsibility very seriously. As we pursue these new tech, it's always done with the constraints and realities that we have to do it in a secure way," he said.
His team has also spent years working on "digital twin" systems, creating an entire suite of sophisticated, mathematical-based model based technologies that modeled the dynamic behavior of the company's processes. Bartusiak explained that his team now uses those models to control and optimize the company's facilities.
"The contributions that we're seeing from Intel take two forms. They showed us the possibilities to bring technologies into our space that we really weren't aware of and one general category is network function virtualization technology. Virtualization software-defined networking, which is technology that Intel is strong in, showed us what's possible to be done in ways that we really hadn't considered," Bartusiak said.
The Open Process Automation Forum
The changes ExxonMobil was looking to make were significant and too extensive to make without outside help. Bartusiak said officials began to take some cues from changes occurring in the defense avionics industry, which was also in the process of transitioning from a long series of closed proprietary systems.
Companies in the defense avionic industry were looking to reduce costs by reusing unchanged radar systems and did so by switching to modular, open and interoperable systems defined by industry standards and procurement specifications that required industrywide standards. This is part of what led to ExxonMobil's focus on collaborative standards.
"But the actual standards process itself requires collaboration and consensus among the whole market, the end users, the system vendors, the hardware suppliers, the software suppliers, and the systems integrators," Bartusiak added.
Today, the Open Process Automation Forum has members across dozens of industries.
"The systems themselves are just enabling infrastructure. The way that we work with our peers in the standards activity is that we don't share what we're doing application-wise with our competition, but we all need this infrastructure. That's the nature of our collaboration, that's where the common ground is, where we can work together," Houk explained.
While some of the suppliers previously involved in this kind of activity might feel threatened by this, Houk said the companies willingly participating are seeing changes in their business.
"The standards are largely about the interfaces between the components that make up an industrial control system. The inner content, the core intellectual property, is still protectable, licensable, capable of generating revenue both from hardware and software products as well as the services required to integrate a system that will work for the end user company," Houk said.
"It's protectable, it's licensable, you can generate earnings with it. That's the nature of the ecosystem we're trying to build."
source: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/exxonmobil-and-intel-collaborate-on-open-industry-standards-technologies/
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Building the Digital Spine of Oil & Gas Enterprises (2020)
Building the Digital Spine of Oil & Gas Enterprises
Abstract
The advent of Fourth Industrial Revolution is transforming the existing cyber-physical systems, impacting the way companies compete, operate, and grow. Increasingly organizations, across industries and geographies, are treading on the digital path by embracing the latest technology trends - from Internet of Things (IoT) to cloud and cognitive computing. The oil and gas (O&G) industry is no exception. Companies are deploying digital technologies to meet industry challenges, resulting in cost savings, increased efficiencies, and improved safety and sustainability. However, there is scope for the O&G industry to better utilize its asset base and become more efficient. This paper discusses how developing a digital spine or making the core strategy digital is key to survival and growth. It highlights the key components of the digital spine and proposes a framework for operationalizing it. Finally, the paper illustrates the relevance of the framework by showcasing various use cases through real word examples.
Full text source: https://www.tcs.com/content/dam/tcs/pdf/Industries/energy_resources_and_utilities/driving-digital-transformation-in-oil-and-gas.pdf
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'Success in the digital space is about enabling the business to be more profitable' - ExxonMobil exec
US supermajor ExxonMobil uses different technologies to help with scheduling, monitoring wells and downhole pressure
3 December 2020
By Julia Martinez
Oil and gas companies need to build competency in harnessing the power of emerging technologies to improve business performance or run the risk of wasting huge amounts of money on products that do not deliver the right results, according to an ExxonMobil executive.
“Far too often I see people want to start with the technology, build a very impressive system, lots of data, lots of AI [artificial intelligence] capabilities,” Michael Deal, vice president of digital transformation for the US supermajor, told a forum on the Rio Oil & Gas 2020 digital conference on Wednesday.
“However these ventures usually just cost a lot of money and they fail to deliver real bottom line impact because they’re a digital solution looking for a problem, and it doesn’t work that way.”
Additionally, ExxonMobil also uses digital technologies to monitor downhole pressure in many of their wells, using AI to calculate the optimal setting for gas lift to get more oil production, while also using rig automation and remote directional drilling to increase the rate of penetration and drive down drilling costs.
“I think we need digital solutions now more than ever,” Deal said.
“It’s easy to get wrapped up in the coolness of the technology but forgetting that success in the digital space is about enabling the business to be more profitable.”
source: https://www.upstreamonline.com/energy-transition/success-in-the-digital-space-is-about-enabling-the-business-to-be-more-profitable-exxonmobil-exec/2-1-924347
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Exxon Mobil’s Halsey: Oil patch’s digital transformation will be comparable to horizontal drilling’s tech revolution
Alex Endress, World Oil, 5/15/2017
The oil field’s digital transformation is bringing sweeping change to the upstream industry, from using data analysis to help companies find the oil, to the possibility of operating equipment autonomously. These technological inventions will bring significant structural changes—similar to how those wrought by the advent of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing changed the industry, reducing the cost of production in North America drastically.
“I see it as a technology and a set of tools, that 20 years from now, if you don’t know how to use and deploy them, you are not going to be in business in this industry,” said Thomas Halsey, chief computational scientist, Exxon Mobil, during a panel discussion on big data analytics at OTC 2017.  Halsey made the statement in response to a question asked of the panel. The question was whether digital technologies, like data analytics and machine learning, could potentially help E&P companies produce from reservoirs that weren’t previously viable—similar to how unconventional technology has opened up shale plays. Halsey said he does not see the digital oil field opening up new geologies, but he does predict that the digitalization of oilfield equipment and operations will continue for the foreseeable future, due to future competitive advantages and untold economic value.
source: https://www.worldoil.com/blog/2017/05/15/exxon-mobil-s-halsey-oil-patch-s-digital-transformation-will-be-comparable-to-horizontal-drilling-s-tech-revolution
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Sponsored content
Oil & gas panel tackles energy transition, digital challenges
By Jim Montague
Nov 18, 2020
“Users can get some quick wins with digitalization, and use them as a foundation for transitioning to a new world.” ExxonMobil’s Dave Hedge argues that the oil and gas industry must adopt digital tools to attract the new generation of technical professionals that will bring the industry forward.
Digital transformation may be one of the few saving graces that can help oil and gas producers cope with their roller-coaster, rapidly transitioning and COVID-19-impacted markets. However, as with any big shift, it's easier said than done.
The Oil & Gas Industry Forum, part of this week’s Automation Fair at Home event, played virtual host to five industry experts to explore these issues and consider possible solutions.
"The pace of transition in the energy industries is accelerating, but there's also a lot of demand destruction now, which has a long-term feel that makes it different than previous events," said Fred Wasden, Shell veteran and managing member at OptilytiX, a consultancy focused on accelerating asset value realization through data analytics and technology implementation for the energy industry. “The second trend is an overwhelming surge of digital technologies by process-industry users, which are being adopted after being risk-tested in other industries. We're also facing a big challenge in recruiting and retaining staff. It's an exciting time, but it's a lot of change all at once."
 “Now, they're going to have to deliver on all fronts. Fortunately, there are ways for oil and gas leaders and their organizations to do it. For example, just as we use the Waze app to navigate our commutes, we've tried equivalent software that can help with operating oil and gas fields, and they can deliver some significant benefits. For many leaders, the focus has been less on inventing new applications, and more on adapting existing software to their processes."
Roach cautioned these shifts aren't easy for process applications because they're so firmly based in physical settings. "Many process assets cost $100 million to $250 million or more, and are so complex that it's hard to develop digital representations, or build models of them that can indicate when they need support or maintenance," said Roach. "Digital twins of physical equipment are also costly up front, but once users have them, they can start to follow their physical counterparts for better performance of engineering, maintenance and support tasks. This is likely where most of the benefits will occur."
About the author: Jim Montague
JimMontague0609Jim Montague is executive editor of Control. He can be contacted at jmontague@putman.net.
source: https://www.controlglobal.com/industrynews/2020/af-at-home-15/
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Anshu Mittal, Andrew Slaughter, Vivek Bansal
Deloitte Insights
15 September 2017
From bytes to barrels The digital transformation in upstream oil and gas
Despite a deluge of digital advancements, upstream oil and gas companies have been slow to seize the opportunity. The prize of going digital is clear, but for most companies, getting there is not easy. A coherent road map could help make sense of the digital muddle and drive more value.
The case for becoming digital
Advancement in technologies, the falling cost of digitalization, and the ever-widening connectivity of devices provide a real competition-beating opportunity to upstream oil and gas (O&G) companies who play the digital revolution right. The lower-for-longer downturn and moderating operational gains have provided an extra incentive—or turned the opportunity into a need—for companies to save millions from their operating costs and, most importantly, make their $3.4 trillion asset base smarter and more efficient.1
What is holding them back from realizing this opportunity? More than the technicalities, it is often the digital muddle that’s deterring companies from achieving digital maturity. Companies can benefit from a strategic road map that helps them assess the digital standing of every operation and identify digital leaps for achieving specific business objectives. More importantly, it could push them to embrace a long-term goal of transforming their core assets and, finally, adopting new operating models (the journey from bytes to barrels).
This paper, first in the series of digital transformation in oil and gas, presents Deloitte’s Digital Operations Transformation (DOT) model—a framework that explains the digital journey through 10 stages of evolution, with cybersecurity and digital culture at the core—and uses it to ascertain the prospective value for seismic exploration, development drilling, and production segments.
source: https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/industry/oil-and-gas/digital-transformation-upstream-oil-and-gas.html
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Gep.com
September 03, 2019 | Energy & Utilities
The internet of things is transforming the oil and gas industry
When digitalization made its initial inroads into the oil and gas industry, it was centered on the adoption of technologies that managed assets and supply chain more efficiently while optimizing processes and costs. Since then, the technological capabilities of the Internet of Things (IoT) — which integrates the advantages of sensing, communications, and analytics — has seen its deployment become imperative in the oil and gas industry to capture, monitor, and analyze every operational area across upstream, midstream, and downstream.
The primary objective of the Internet of Things in the oil and gas industry is to maximize operational efficiency.
According to an April 2019 report from Swedish IoT market research firm Berg Insight, wireless IoT devices had a global installed base of 1.3 million units in the oil and gas industry in 2018. These devices use sensor-level technology to enable firms to monitor and collect more data to optimize business processes more effectively.
A Few Use Cases of IoT in the Oil and Gas Industry
Leading oil and gas companies regularly feature on lists of the world’s largest companies by revenue. The adoption of IoT by these companies is indicative of the power and potential of digital transformation in global business.
Shell
In 2016, Shell deployed an IoT connectivity solution that combined IT automation and instrumentation technologies to collect data from remote oilfields and optimize operational efficiencies. This enabled improved wellhead monitoring and pipeline surveillance capabilities for Shell’s remote infrastructure.
In 2018, Shell selected C3 IoT as its artificial intelligence (AI) platform, deployed globally on Microsoft Azure, for a broad set of AI applications — including predictive maintenance for a large base of critical pieces of equipment. Shell has expressed its intent to extend the support of this platform to other use cases based on machine vision, machine learning, and natural language processing in upstream, downstream, and other operations. Through this move, Shell hopes to accelerate digital transformation and enhance the productivity and scope of its advanced analytics capabilities.
ExxonMobil
In February 2019, ExxonMobil partnered with Microsoft to implement cloud-based technologies in its Permian Basin operations. The move is intended to ensure a more efficient operation and improve profit gains by using Microsoft’s technologies, including Microsoft Azure, Dynamics 365, Machine Learning, and IoT. The move ensures that ExxonMobil will gain insights into well operations and future drilling prospects, which is expected to increase production of the Permian operations by approximately 50,000 oil-equivalent barrels/day by 2025. Leveraging the power of IoT and the cloud, ExxonMobil hopes to address the concern of monitoring and optimizing widely dispersed field assets and improve capital efficiency.
Saudi Aramco
Saudi Aramco and Honeywell signed a deal in 2017 that was aimed at diversifying the UAE’s energy sector and accelerating the advantages of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) within Saudi Aramco’s operations through predictive analytics and cloud-based solutions. The development is expected to increase throughput, raise yield and improve the reliability of the company’s operations.
source: https://www.gep.com/blog/mind/the-internet-of-things-is-transforming-the-oil-and-gas-industry
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Digital Transformation in Oil & Gas – How to Choose the Right Partners?
Oil Review Africa
Wednesday, 19 August 2020
Digitisation: A Must for the Oil and Gas Industry
According to Accenture Technology Vision 2019, of the 168 oil and gas executives surveyed, 85 per cent from upstream and 90 per cent from downstream companies said that they were currently implementing one or more of the following technologies: Distributed Ledger Technology, AI, Extended Reality, and Quantum Computing (DARQ).
In recent years, most large oil and gas companies have increased investment in digital transformation. Internationally, large multinationals have launched their own digital and intelligent oilfield construction plans, such as the Digital Oilfield by ExxonMobil, Integrated Development by ConocoPhillips, Smart-Field by Royal Dutch Shell, I-Field by Chevron, and E-Field by BP.
A Difficult Road to Digital Transformation
Each upstream enterprise progresses at a different pace during digital transformation. Various companies in the oil and gas industry have achieved different levels of development in data monitoring and collection, device networking, data analysis, and predictive maintenance; the industry overall has had some success in these domains. However, the further the industry transforms digitally, the more challenges it faces.
source: https://www.oilreviewafrica.com/technical-focus/technical-focus/digital-transformation-in-oil-gas-how-to-choose-the-right-partners
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S&P Global
Market Intelligence, 11 Jun, 2018 | 12:32
Oil, gas executives expect quantum computing to change the face of industry
   Author Mark Passwaters Theme Energy
The next big breakthrough for the oil and gas sector may come from applying quantum computer technology to the industry's data-intensive processes, executives said at KPMG's Global Energy Conference in Houston.
Quantum computers, powerful machines that build on the principles of quantum mechanics to solve complex tasks, can dramatically speed up the pace of processing data for oil and gas companies. Though quantum computing is still in its infancy, Woodside Energy Ltd. COO Mike Utsler said it has remarkable potential.
"It can speed up the [time needed for data processing] from 12 hours to 12 minutes to 12 seconds," he said. "That's the level of potential of quantum computing in the hydrocarbon supply chain."
Time savings are not the only big change in store for industry, the energy executives said. Many companies will need to step back and take a look at their hiring and technology management. Some have neglected to keep pace with computer technology and are "in catchup mode," BP PLC Vice President of Digital Innovation Morag Watson said.
As computers become more of a part of the oil and gas industry, executives are learning that they need "pure scientists" operating their systems, not ones with familiarity with hydrocarbons. Those who have that knowledge tend to mold their answers toward specific scenarios, not all situations.
"We … stopped trying to teach our computer analysts about the oil and gas industry," Utsler said. "What we did learn was that if our problems were discovered at a practical level, from reservoir to customer, we would need a translator [to get the information from the field to the 'pure scientists']."
source: https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights/trending/x4cbur85qkeeniymgckgag2
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