Enterprise AI at Shell

Shell has been a pioneer in the development and deployment of digital technologies in oil and gas for decades. Today, they have over 100 AI applications in various stages of development and deployment across their businesses; a data lake with trillions of rows of data and monitoring of thousands of pieces of industrial equipment using machine learning across assets in upstream, downstream, manufacturing, and integrated gas.

C3.ai is an integral part of enabling Shell’s deployment of enterprise AI solutions at scale. Shell is continuing their journey to replicate and scale solutions in the areas of industrial reliability, asset optimization, and integrity management. Their predictive maintenance solutions, built on the C3 AI Platform, have realized value through increased reliability and reduction in cost. The adoption of enterprise AI and data-centric workflows for oil and gas are changing how they work with their assets and driving efficiency across their businesses.

Additionally, Shell uses AI to optimize asset performance. Real Time Production Optimization takes information from hardware sensors for pressure, temperature and flow rates and then calculates the optimum setting to safely maximise the efficiency of the systems. At the same time, it handles operational, economic and engineering constraints. Continually optimizing this process under changing weather conditions allows Shell to squeeze out an additional 1-2% of LNG production. This solution has also demonstrated the potential to reduce CO2 emissions. At an LNG facility, the technology delivered a CO2 emissions reduction of ~355 tonnes a day when the plant was operating at full capacity – this can add up to 130 kilotons per year, the equivalent of taking 28,000 average US vehicles off the road.

Shell is also using digitalization and AI to reduce the footprint of its operations. For example, it uses AI to improve inventory demand planning, reduce waste of products and raw materials, and decrease idle time of heavy machinery, and uses AR, robotics and digital twin technologies to reduce the need for travel. AI is also helping Shell offer low-carbon energy solutions to its customers, from AI solutions that reduce the fuel consumption of ships, to smart charging of electric vehicles that optimizes renewable energy use on the grid, to virtual power plants that connect decentralized energy units, to solar, bio-energy, and hydropower.