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Smarter pipelines: digital technologies and trends

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Oil and Gas pipeline operators are investing heavily in new digital technologies to improve control, inspection and maintenance of assets. The COVID-19 outbreak and oil price drop put pressure on the industry and companies have to cut costs, increase efficiencies, and improve decision making to do more with less resources. 

Let’s see how innovations enable real-time data collection, enhanced connectivity, automation and advanced analytics. 

Digital twin for construction

Digital twins are created to manage and optimize the asset operations, however they can provide more benefits to the operators. McDermott conducted a study showing how digital twins can improve pipeline construction. Subsea pipeline design stages create a complicated flow of data with iterative loops. Through a digital twin, companies can get the access to all the relevant projects’ information carried from the design stage through the operational stage. This way engineers have a quicker turn-around on projects with the opportunity to run various scenarios and better understand the consequences of design decisions.

Automated inspection

According to industry forecasts, the Oil and Gas drone service market will grow at a CAGR of over 60% by 2025 and midstream is expected to be one of the fastest-growing segments. Vallourec, FORSSEA Robotics, and iXblue have recently started working on the subsea drone pipeline inspection solution that enables vessel-free navigation. The project idea is based on barcodes directly integrated on subsea pipelines. They would be used as navigation aids for subsea drones removing the need for acoustic positioning systems and pricey mother vessels.

Data-driven decision-making

Pipeline corrosion is one of the major oil and gas production industry problems that costs operators more than one billion USD a year. ROSEN Group supports the creation of the ‘integrity data warehouse’ project aimed to house pipeline data sets from all over the world. It will give operators the opportunity to look outside the data that pertains to one asset and use information from other pipelines that might be applicable to theirs. This approach will allow to create better predictive models and improve decision-making.

The virtual TOGC 2020 Congress is gathering midstream decision makers at BGS Online platform on 16-17 November 2020 including digital innovation providers: ROSEN Group, Distran, end-users: McDermott, Eni, REN Portgas, Gazprom, TANAP, Botas and other leading companies. 

BGS Online is the special virtual event platform created by BGS Group. It provides you with the same experience as the in-person event and gives you even more networking opportunities.

Full list of participants


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