Hydrogen, AI, and remote operations: lessons from Baker Hughes’ AM

On Monday and Tuesday, oilfield services company Baker Hughes held its Annual Meeting and conference for the oil and gas industry. The conference was held online due to the Covid-19 pandemic, allowing upstream and downstream businesses to watch technology sessions and keynote speeches in an (almost) seamless virtual environment.

While conferences often focus on possible future innovations, many talks focused on the potential of current innovations that have accelerated in the past year. Here is what we learned during the conference.

Technology collaboration will be the way forward

Throughout the conference, speakers emphasised the value of industry-wide collaboration, particularly as part of the energy transition.

In a roundtable discussion, Baker Hughes executives discussed the potential of digital monitoring, and where collaboration enters the system. Baker Hughes chief technology officer of digital solutions Scott Parent told us: “We’re opening the door to plug-and-play across Baker Hughes, whether that be emissions monitoring, rotating equipment, or other things. The digital footprint has grown.

“In discussions with the team, we have recognised that there are parts of our facilities we are not going to monitor and build analytics for; there are other companies that do that. If we have a digital environment that is open enough to allow other companies in, then it gives us new capabilities and makes our system more valuable. We’re still mulling the strategy over, but it makes a lot of sense for us. More integration, broader application, more assets under one roof.”

Oilfield services vice president of digital Shan Jegatheeswaran continued: “We don’t want to be the CostCo of digital. We need to focus on what we want to be great at, and where we want to partner. Co-operation is greater than corporation, and we don’t want to get caught up in the nitty-gritty of who owns what. Co-operation is going to affect who we hire, and how we build software going forward.”

As part of this, Baker Hughes announced a collaboration with Shell, C3 AI, and Microsoft to build a set of AI systems for oil and gas companies. These systems would be interoperable both between themselves and with existing industry solutions.

The current systems operate with pre-trained AI models in equipment-specific and process-specific modules. These can use libraries of operating parameters for machinery, monitor a systems global health, and recommend actions to prevent system failures. Shell has started by making its predictive maintenance modules available.

Source: OT

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