Rockets to the moon and floating production units both present complex engineering challenges for success and safety in harsh environments.
BP and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) are bringing together expertise from two things Houston is nicknamed for—Space City and the nation’s energy capital—to collaborate on some of those challenges.
BP announced 13 August the signing of the Space Act Agreement with NASA, paving the way for collaboration on a variety of technologies, such as digital models and simulations that allow engineers and scientists to visualize equipment in remote locations in more than 7,000-ft water depth or millions of miles away in space. The agreement could lay the foundation for future collaborations on hydrogen, regenerative fuel cells, high-capacity batteries, solar power systems, small fission systems, and power management and distribution.
Ken Nguyen, BP’s principal technical program manager, told JPT that oil and space organizations both work in very harsh environments that require solving complex engineering challenges and that joining the “brain power” of BP and NASA experts offers the opportunity to create innovative ideas.
“We also want to be able to operate in an efficient way, in a collaborative way, across a number of vendors” that are required to pull together a complex project, he said. “This is an opportunity for us to collaborate on technology, ways of working, and really learning some lessons. It's about working together to take the things that NASA has learned and worked on and sharing it and using it for the production of energy.”
For instance, the resilience of NASA’s space probes, which operate at distances of billions of miles away for years, are of particular interest for building resilience and increased safety into remote oil installations, Nguyen said.
“They are in space, where they’ve got to make sure that when they put people and equipment in space, it's got to work and be safe, and certainly we would want the same thing here on Earth,” he said.
The collaboration could also lead to transformations in how BP delivers energy, he said.
“We see that it's a huge opportunity for us to make a real difference in the way that we design and operate new assets or existing assets, that really can make a tangible difference to the way that we currently do it today,” Nguyen said.
That could mean the production of cryogenic fuel, like hydrogen, with potential use as a fuel source in space, he said.
Nick Skytland, chief technologist and business development technology integration director for NASA’s Johnson Space Center, told JPT the agreement will provide mutual learning opportunities.
“We want to learn from others, want to build the technology to prepare us for the next giant leap, whether it's on the Moon or ultimately on Mars,” he said. “When we go back to the Moon and Mars, and live on the Moon and Mars, it's not just going to be NASA that's doing this. We have a lot of industry partners.”
Some of those partners will be focused on aerospace, but other industries will contribute as well, he said.
“Energy is something that we're going to have to figure out on Earth and then elsewhere,” Skytland said.
Skytland said collaborations help NASA’s engineers, scientists, and technologists see how other organizations tackle challenges.
“What can we learn from others who are doing something that maybe we don't traditionally think about?” Skytland asked. “I think this is going to be really, really helpful for us as we are trying to innovate, trying to think differently, and trying to do that rapidly.”
Bringing engineers together can lead to innovations.
“Maybe that's a new AR (augmented reality), VR (virtual reality) visualization technique, or maybe it's an application of something they've stood up, but that we could apply in a new environment,” he said. “They work in hazardous environments, and we work in hazardous environments. Maybe we do it a little bit differently. Maybe we deploy our infrastructure a little differently than they normally would.”
Nguyen said BP sees potential benefits from learning from NASA’s expertise in robotics, artificial general intelligence, and remote operations. And BP could benefit from that collaboration fairly quickly by using an agile framework that makes it possible to immediately incorporate learnings into BP projects, he said.
Areas of Focus
Skytland said, “Obviously, space exploration is very complicated. Keeping humans alive is even more complicated in space and harsh environments.”
As such, NASA is seeking to develop standards that could be useful for its engineers as well as expanding and developing capabilities of visualization and simulation.
“Generally, standards are super important in every industry,” Skytland said, noting NASA works with a lot of industry providers on space flight systems. “We want to do that in common ways.”
Rather than prescribing a solution, he said, the goal is to find a way to collaborate and ensure all the pieces interface correctly.
“If industry is building something over here, and NASA's building something over here, we need those things to interface, and the first time we need them to interface and test that and make sure that works, is not in space. It’s here on Earth, and ideally in a digital world,” he said.
Aside from working to define common standards around data, model, and taxonomy requirements to ensure data is right, Nguyen said the collaboration will focus on advancing digital twin and simulation modeling technology
“We within BP are pretty advanced in terms of our use of what we call dynamic digital twin, in terms of being able to model and replicate our physical asset in a way that has both static and dynamic data that we use operationally,” he said. With NASA, “we want to share and collaborate that together, but take it a step further right with the goals of how to really fully become remote.”
Skytland said NASA is interested in how it can make its static models more responsive and more physics-based to support operations in space with limited supporting infrastructure.
“All of that requires high-bandwidth communication, efficient data transfer, and you're doing that in places that don't have a lot of infrastructure to support that, again, just like an energy-type application,” he said. “We're trying to figure out, ‘What does it look like, not just to land on the Moon, but to live there with a human presence that's sustainable into the future?’”
