Overview
One of the world’s leading oil and gas producers looked for a better way to reduce costly equipment failures at its assets around the globe. Each of this company’s businesses is composed of multiple assets that include oil well basins, offshore platforms, refineries, pipelines, and retail outlets. Each asset operates vast arrays of equipment that are orchestrated with the goal of maximizing the efficiency of oil production. At any point in time, any one of these components can fail – with potentially catastrophic results.
With millions of assets at different locations around the world, creating a scalable predictive asset maintenance solution posed a significant challenge from both an architecture and data science perspective. After exploring alternative approaches, the oil and gas producer selected the C3 AI Platform, the leading enterprise AI platform for oil and gas brought to market jointly by Baker Hughes and C3 AI. It was chosen as their AI platform of choice to build scalable, enterprise software enabled by AI–beginning with predictive maintenance use cases. Working collaboratively with BakerHughesC3.ai experts in a purpose-driven Center of Excellence (CoE), the oil and gas producer has moved swiftly by leveraging the capabilities of the C3 AI Platform to create and deploy C3 AI Reliability applications at enterprise scale within months of kick-off. These applications notify instrument engineers when asset components are behaving abnormally. This supports a proactive approach to maintenance in which engineers prevent failures before they happen.
Rapid Software Development at the Center of Excellence
BakerHughesC3.ai worked with the oil and gas producer to establish a global Center of Excellence with two development teams spread across four different countries. The CoE provides the oil and gas producer with a governance structure and dedicated BakerHughesC3.ai personnel to share best practices, identify obstacles, and keep work on schedule. The BakerHughesC3.ai and customer teams collaborate to identify high-value use cases, specify and build applications within the C3 AI Platform, and run and optimize them over time. In the CoE’s first year, the oil and gas producer developed two applications now in production and one deployed for field testing. They now aim to deliver more than 15 distinct applications over a period of four years.
Predicting Failures for Control Valves across the Globe
C3 AI Reliability for Control Valves enables instrument engineers to perform predictive maintenance at scale to all control valves within the asset. C3 AI Reliability is composed of a blend of predictive maintenance and machine learning model management. It is accessible to end users via a web UI application interface built entirely using the C3 AI Platform’s model-driven architecture.
Predicting Failures for Compressors Across the Globe
C3 AI Reliability for Compressors enables instrument engineers to perform predictive maintenance at scale on all compressors within the asset. The application leverages a non-linear machine learning model custom-tailored for each compressor by the oil and gas producer’s data scientists and subject matter experts. It is accessible to end users via a web UI application interface built using the React framework and interfaces with the BC3 AI Application Platform via REST API.
Predicting Failures for Progressive Cavity Pumps
Field trials of C3 AI Reliability for progressive cavity pumps (PCPs) are now in progress at one of the oil and gas producer’s natural gas divisions. These pumps were a leading cause of well failures within the division and the second largest annual operational spend. Overall, the estimated annual economic impact of PCP failures across all 3,000 of the division’s wells is more than $60 million.
Solution Architecture
Enterprise AI for Oil & Gas
The C3 AI Platform provides the necessary and comprehensive services to build enterprise-scale AI applications up to 25x faster than alternative approaches. The C3 AI Platform integrates all relevant data sources to rapidly generate predictive insights across the oil and gas value chain. When deployed at enterprise-scale, C3 AI applications can deliver up to $100 million and more in annual economic value to oil and gas organizations.
Proven results in weeks, not years
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