Shell has selected Bentley Systems, a provider of software and digital twin cloud services, to help streamline its capital projects and decrease time to first oil.
Shell says it has plans for several subsea tieback projects over the next 10 years and saw an opportunity to accelerate capital project delivery and cut project delivery time by implementing an integrated digital project and engineering environment. The solution spans project conception from the early phase design through to handover.
“Shell ... is developing an integrated work flow and data platform from system selection to asset handover to streamline our capital projects processes and accelerate time to first oil,” said G.T. Ju, Shell’s general manager for project delivery. “The platform is being developed in partnership with Bentley, leveraging Bentley’s iTwin open, scalable Azure-cloud-based platform, which provides interoperability across owner and supply chain systems. We believe that an end-to-end platform that gives us visibility and transparency to project and engineering data across our portfolio will be a key driver to delivering competitive projects.”
Nicholas Cumins, Bentley’s chief product officer, said “ ‘Think big, prove small, scale fast’ sums up the overall approach Shell and Bentley share in this initiative. Bentley’s iTwin platform is ideally suited to providing aligned, secure, and visual access to project data across the supply chain and capital projects ecosystem. Shell’s selection of Bentley’s iTwin platform validates our open approach to digital twins and underscores the ability of the platform to scale to the largest, most-complex capital projects and dynamic engineering use cases.”
In addition, Bentley announced that it is providing investment funds to FutureOn, a Norwegian software company supporting deepwater subsea projects, to accelerate going digital within the oil and gas industry. The investment sets the stage for FutureOn and Bentley to deliver the next-generation digital twin technology required for oil and gas ecosystems to manage and analyze data, integrate with existing systems, provide analytics visibility, and rapidly explore ideas collaboratively.
FutureOn will combine its field-design application FieldAP and its collaboration platform FieldTwin with Bentley’s digital twin platform iTwin to advance user organizations such as Shell Deepwater. Both FutureOn and Bentley platforms use open web standards to facilitate complex integration and customization, and the combined offerings are already being used in exploration and production work flows for the creation and curation of subsea digital twins.
“The Bentley Acceleration Fund investment is a significant milestone for FutureOn and will help drive the growth of our business by advancing the FutureOn technology as well as extending our reach,” said Paal Roppen, FutureOn’s chief executive officer. “Today, digitalization is more important than ever for the oil and gas industry as challenging market conditions persist. Innovative and disruptive digital twin technologies such as those we develop alongside Bentley will help farsighted organizations like Shell Deepwater to improve project and asset performance.”