BHGE AM: SeaLytics offers real-time monitoring insights to enhance operator performance
FLORENCE -- Baker Hughes, a GE company’s oilfield equipment business works together with customers to maintain well performance by maintaining equipment performance. The business continues to evolve, to meet and exceed industry standards and customer expectations. Relying on systems that have been successful in the past helps the firm move forward. In addition, offering customizable options for customers helps the company move forward in relationships. During Day One of the BHGE Annual Meeting 2019, with two leaders in BHGE’s OFE business discuss progress on real-time monitoring and customer service.
Digital transformation to meet and exceed industry regulations. The U.S. Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) has released well control rules that have raised the bar in the industry regarding real-time monitoring requirements. “We like highly regulated industries—it is where we thrive.” said Chuck Chauviere, V.P., subsea drilling systems, oilfield equipment, BHGE. As an example, failure reporting is now a standard practice in the Gulf of Mexico. “That creates a unified view, with agreed-upon taxonomy that we can do something with, to make our company better,” continued Chauviere. Accordingly, BHGE is working toward meeting BSEE rules with SeaLytics.
Many operators are self-monitoring rig activity to avoid unwanted downtime. BHGE offers a real-time monitoring service that uses an external team of experts, with access to cutting-edge industry trends and up-to-the-minute analysis, said Bob Judge, director, drilling products, subsea drilling systems, oilfield equipment, BHGE. As an additional incentive, the company has been working with multiple operators to collect and share rig data to help the collective industry.
It benefits operators to learn from both the failures and success of others, but it is also important to be good stewards of these data, not sharing any proprietary information. Data ownership is always a challenge, however, across the industry. By implementing BHGE’s SeaLytics, an edge device that resides on the rig, data flows one way to the device, where it is collected, displayed and analyzed by a team of experts. However, this alone, does not meet BSEE requirements. As a next step, BHGE has implemented a cloud component to leverage the legacy Baker Hughes Well Link platform, that is used for real-time monitoring for logging and directional drilling services. Now, data can be collected on SeaLytics, then transferred to Well Link, which acts as a repository, thus meeting BSEE requirements. In addition, these data will then be available to the analytics teams, as they search for ways to reduce downtime for operators.
Historically, there was a challenge to find the root cause of failure on a rig. Now, data from the cloud can be analyzed, before, during and after the failure, to determine the root cause. “In order to build a rule, you have to have access to the data, up until the failure, and then you have to have a failure… That’s the only way your model can be trained,” said Judge. The idea is to identify a potential problem, and have it repaired during well-maintenance.
The new BHGE SeaLytics cloud-service into Well Link is being configured for Diamond CSA rigs. In addition, the company has identified many other rigs in the Gulf of Mexico that could potentially benefit from the service, as early as second-quarter 2019. This will be a major improvement from harvesting data manually, and it may cut down on user error when transferring data, avoiding viruses.
Commercial intensity. BHGE is working on ways to make the OFE business a more competitive landscape, using innovative commercial models. One such opportunity is by implementing contractual service agreements (CSAs). These are customized risk-sharing agreements for BHGE’s equipment, to ensure that devices run at peak performance. In one option, BHGE owns the equipment and rents access to drilling contractors. For this instance, OFE has borrowed the trademarked term, “power by the hour,” from its turbomachinery business and adapted it to “pressure control by the hour.” This term is used to show that BHGE has a vested interest in the availability and reliability of the equipment. “When the equipment is available, we get paid, and when it’s not, we don’t’ get paid,” said Chauviere. Additional customized options include planned maintenance coverage, unplanned maintenance coverage, dedicated engineers, asset performance management and performance guarantees.
