Building Norwegian Competitiveness

by Arild Waaler. From Annual Report 2017, written in March 2018.

In February 2018, KonKraft published recommendations on how to improve the competitiveness of the Norwegian Oil and Gas industry. This report emphasizes improved digitalization through standardization, sharing of data and new modes of interaction. Its recommendations confirm that several projects in the SIRIUS portfolio are spot on in meeting what the industry itself identifies as challenges that need immediate attention.

KonKraft aims to develop national strategies for the petroleum sector and has an industry-wide mandate. The recommendations in the recent report spring out of a process where key stakeholders in the oil and gas industry were consulted. Several SIRIUS partners contributed to the KonKraft work and SIRIUS’ leadership engaged in two meetings with the KonKraft working group. Given the current focus on digitalization there is every reason to believe that the KonKraft report will be carefully read in the industry.

One of the detailed points in the KonKraft report stresses the importance of the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate’s DISKOS database and recommends measures to improve its usability. In the SIRIUS beacon Access to Exploration Data we attempt to do exactly this. One of our activities is to deploy techniques from ontology-based data access to improve interoperability and access to DISKOS in a project where KADME, one of the suppliers in the current DISKOS operating consortium, plays a key role. On the research side, our new colleagues from the Department of Geosciences collaborate with the Work Practices and Knowledge Representation strands. We also plan to design an information portal for subsurface data in response to demands from Statoil. Both of these projects can deliver innovations quickly. On a longer horizon we believe that SIRIUS’ work on using natural language technologies to produce structured data from exploration reports, done in collaboration with IBM and Statoil, can be applied to shared data resources like DISKOS.

In digitalization of field development, the KonKraft report recommends improved standardization and sharing of asset information through use of digital twins. To this end, KonKraft recommends acceleration of the current NORSOK Z-TI digitalization project. A key goal of the Z-TI project is to develop a method for capturing requirements in a structured form that allows effective verification, analysis, and sharing. Z-TI aims to achieve this by deploying cutting-edge knowledge representation techniques, and in particular automated reasoning over OWL ontologies. SIRIUS is deeply involved in the Z-TI project through DNV GL and Statoil, supported by the SIRIUS management and the Knowledge Representation strand. SIRIUS’ contribution to Z-TI is at the core of the SIRIUS “Digital Thread” beacon project.

SIRIUS follows up on digital twins in a separate beacon project that targets both design and operations. The “Digital Twin” beacon was initiated in 2017 with several partners involved, notably Computas, DNV and OSIsoft.

On a broader level, the SIRIUS project portfolio is all about using cutting-edge techniques from our research strands to advance digitalization in the industry through improved access to data, sharing of information, and analysis and simulation of complex scenarios. In this, we are exactly aligned with KonKraft’s recommendations.