BP Deploys Plant Operations Advisor on Gulf of Mexico Platforms

BP has successfully deployed Plant Operations Advisor (POA), a cloud-based advanced analytics solution developed with Baker Hughes, a GE company, across all four of its operated production platforms in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico.

The announcement comes after an initial deployment of POA proved the technology could help prevent unplanned downtime at BP’s Atlantis platform in the Gulf. The technology has now been successfully installed and tested at BP’s Thunder Horse, Na Kika and Mad Dog platforms – and it will continue to be deployed to more than 30 of BP’s upstream assets across the globe.

“BP has been one of the pioneers in digital technology in our industry, and co-development of Plant Operations Advisor with BHGE is a key plank of modernizing and transforming our upstream operations,” said Ahmed Hashmi, BP’s global head of upstream technology. “We expect the deployment of this technology not only to deliver improvements in safety, reliability and performance of our assets, but also to help raise the bar for the entire oil and gas industry.”

Built on GE’s Predix platform, POA applies analytics to real-time data from the production system and provides system-level insights to engineers so operational issues on processes and equipment can be addressed before they become significant. POA helps engineers manage the performance of BP’s offshore assets by further ensuring that assets operate within safe operating limits to reduce unplanned downtime.

Now live across the Gulf of Mexico, POA works across more than 1,200 mission-critical pieces of equipment, analyzing more than 155 million data points per day and delivering insights on performance and maintenance. There are plans to continue augmenting the analytical capabilities in the system as POA is expanded to BP’s upstream assets around the globe.

BP and BHGE announced a partnership in 2016 to develop POA, an industry-wide solution for improved plant reliability. The teams have built a suite of cloud-based Industrial 'internet of things' (IoT) solutions that have been tailor-fit for BP’s oil and gas operations.

“The partnership between BP and BHGE has resulted in a unique set of capabilities that quickly find valuable insights in streams of operational data,” said Matthias Heilmann, president and CEO of Digital Solutions and chief digital officer for Baker Hughes, a GE company. “Together, we are creating leading-edge technologies to automate processes and increase the safety and reliability of BP’s upstream assets. As we extend the solution globally, this will become the largest upstream Industrial IoT deployment in the world when complete.”

BP is currently in the process of deploying POA to its operations in Angola with additional deployments in Oman and the North Sea scheduled for 2019.

Source: BP