The Energy industry has embraced a very challenging effort towards a paradigmatic transition towards low-carbon operations. This implies also an increasing attention towards higher efficiency in the core businesses. As the industry steps up in its efforts to reconcile, on a day-by-day basis, its production targets with long-term sustainability goals, improving circularity and efficiency of upstream production assets is paramount to reduce energy consumption, a necessary step to reduce overall emissions and minimize the environmental impact on the host territory.
The increased availability of real-time field data, digitalized information and documentation, has made technically and economically feasible to approach operating issues by applying new tools and methodologies. For example, Big Data and Machine Learning techniques, implemented with success in other businesses, have been explored and extended to the O&G industry, opening new challenges but also new opportunities to be taken in order to satisfy and even exceed operations' requirements.
Our contribution highlights the results of the development and implementation of an innovative tool to predict the short-term trend of the energy efficiency index [Stationary Combustion CO2 Emission tCO2/kboe] and to suggest the optimal actions to manage an upstream production plant. The developed tool represents a step towards a Sustainable Digital Transformation of production plants based on the integration of Big Data Analytics and Machine Learning methodologies with experts' domain knowledge and resource efficiency goals.
The main advantages experimented by the first implementation tests are related to the significant reduction of CO2 emissions attained while granting the highest level of production, an increased sensibility of site operations team and a validated improvement towards the carbon neutrality target. Moreover, the blueprint approach adopted during the tool development allows to scale up and export easily ("plug-and-play") this solution to other energy-consuming assets, like the circular ones (i.e. Bio-refinery, waste-to-fuel, etc.).
The United Nations' 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, presented in New York in September 2015, identifies 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which represent common goals for the current complex challenges and are an important reference for the international community. As part of these global challenges, energy plays a fundamental role for the achievement of primary needs, for the socio-economic development of Countries, and for the protection of the environment and international security.
