Growing the vision
The major challenge of the project was aligning the organization around a common platform that could then enable rapid deployment. To address that challenge, Mathur and her team decided to develop and fund a global program, align the organization around a common platform, and build a community that shares best practices and supports one another.
The team started by building a digital twin of the company’s Australia Pacific Liquified Natural Gas (APLNG) facility located on an island off Queensland, Australia, that cost $8.5 billion to construct. It has a long-term contract to supply natural gas to the state and export to Japan, and took the team a month to go from data gathering to a working minimum viable product (MVP). Within six months, the facility was actively using the digital twin to support operations.
The company attributes the speed of delivery to a combination of a global focused team in the business unit, a consulting group with decades of experience building digital twins, and a software vendor committed to the project — all delivering in a scalable cloud environment that enabled access from anywhere.
The team moved on to develop a digital twin for the company’s Alaska fields and is researching how to build digital twins for its unconventional fields in the US’s lower 48 states. Major projects and expansions are also planned in Canada, across Norway, Alaska, and at the APLNG.
To select a single software solution for digital twins, ConocoPhillips partnered with Global Supply Chain to conduct a request for information/request for proposal (RFI/P) process. Multiple business units provided input on the selection criteria to ensure alignment around the preferred technology. Once the company selected its preferred technology, Mathur and her team developed a common data integration layer. The team built and deployed the digital twin technology in Microsoft Azure, which helped provide global access, performance, scalability, and lower cost than if it hosted in-house.
As far as community and best practices go, the Norway business unit pioneered the company’s use of digital twins and developed the technology for most of the company’s North Sea platforms. That team shared the business benefits of digital twins and held knowledge-transfer sessions with each group. The global team leveraged Microsoft Teams to support the global community, posting regular progress updates and hosting information sharing sessions across business units.
To date, ConocoPhillips says it’s been seeing up to a four-times ROI for its digital twins, though individual examples have had a significantly higher impact. Early successes have led to an explosion in demand as well.
“Whatever you think you’re going to do with your digital twin when you start the program is not where it’s going to be when you get there,” Purday says. “In one of our business units, they had 10 use cases they thought they could potentially use, and of those, they focused on three. Now they have a list of 100 use cases that could be positively impacted by using twin technology. Having access to a digital twin spurs creativity.”
Mathur says she’s now looking at how digital twins can be connected to other parts of the company for further digital transformation.
“A digital twin, by itself, is one thing, but digital twin connected to other data and systems becomes much more powerful,” she says. “That’s the goal we’re trying to achieve — not just to have digital twins, but to be able to connect other systems and technologies so that a technician or field worker has access to all the relevant information on a portable device.”
