BP Connects Up Its Oil Wells To The IoT

BP has announced a major new software partnership that will eventually see thousands of its oil wells going online.

The much-maligned firm will be working with General Electric (GE) to connect up its wells to the ‘Industrial Internet’ in an effort to further boost oil production.

BP field engineers will now use GE’s data management software to get real-time access to data sets from across the wells, hopefully helping them improve efficiency, prevent failures and minimise costly downtime.

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Specifically, BP will be using GE’s Predix data gathering and analytics platform for the initial rollout, gathering data from up to 30 sensors in each well to provide real time data which can even be uploaded to the cloud for future analysis.

The project will initially be deployed across 650 of BP’s wells, expanding to 4,000 wells across the world over the next several years.

“This project highlights BP’s commitment to deploying technology that can not only improve efficiency and reduce the complexity of our operations, but that also continuously make them safer and more reliable,” said Peter Griffiths, BP system optimisation strategist.

“In this case, we are delivering a solution on a standard platform that supports BP’s move away from bespoke solutions to-off-the-shelf industry solutions that integrate with our work processes, but without the long-term support costs that a bespoke approach often entails.”

The news marks the latest partnership between GE and BP since they started working together in 2008, with the former providing data analysis and instrumentation to improve operational reliability at a number of BP sites around the world.

“Enabling efficiency is the top priority for our customers in the current low oil price environment,” said Lorenzo Simonelli, President and CEO of GE Oil and Gas.

“We are pleased to see that customers like BP have welcomed our Industrial Internet solutions as a unique way to tackle this in order to increase production, manage costs and reduce downtime. The combination of tangible infrastructure knowledge and Industrial Internet expertise places us in a unique position to continue to grow this offering in a way which truly delivers for our customers.”

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