Ancala Midstream Unlocks Scalability and Agility for Its Oil and Gas Operations Using EnergySys Software

Managing asset data in the oil and gas industry can be challenging. From offshore wells to pipelines to liquefied natural gas plants, a single company could oversee many individual assets that need to comply with complex commercial agreements.

EnergySys Limited (EnergySys) simplifies data management using a simple-to-deploy, cloud-native, low-code environment. Its software is powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and provides oil and gas companies the opportunity to configure their own applications and transform their complex businesses.

In one compelling example of the value that EnergySys provides, independent operator Ancala Midstream Acquisitions Limited (Ancala Midstream) streamlined production data management for its complex North Sea business by adopting EnergySys’s low-code software. Since implementing this cloud-native solution, the oil and gas company is better managing its diverse operations and has achieved newfound business agility.

Configuring versus Customizing Oil and Gas Business Software

Oil and gas operators face unique challenges when managing and reporting asset data. It’s very rare that an out-of-the-box solution will successfully address all the individual requirements. A bespoke software solution is usually required to get an optimal view of an asset. However, these solutions are not always affordable or reliable. Each customer would need to invest a significant amount of time and money to implement fully customized business software, increasing the total cost of ownership. If a customer wanted to implement a new application or respond to a change in its regulatory environment, it would need to ask a vendor to customize the service on its behalf or build a bespoke solution to close the gap.

EnergySys believes that software should be more than customizable—it should be configurable and should provide simple-to-use tools for customers to build their own solutions. “Heavy customization can be expensive and take a long time to deliver,” says Dr. Peter Black, managing director of EnergySys. “We chose to use AWS services to build a low-code cloud environment where users could configure their own applications, which has been incredibly successful.”

Using EnergySys’s standard cloud environment, oil and gas companies can create innovative applications to meet their unique business needs. Because the system is low code, they do not need to know any programming languages to develop these powerful solutions. The cloud-native environment can also scale as needed to support new users and applications. The backend infrastructure is powered by highly scalable AWS services like Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provides secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload, and AWS Lambda, a serverless, event-driven compute service. Because EnergySys manages these critical components, its customers can focus on developing innovative solutions to complex business problems rather than maintaining technical infrastructure.

Transforming Ancala Midstream’s Business with EnergySys

Ancala Midstream oversees critical oil and gas infrastructure for the United Kingdom, including the Scottish Area Gas Evacuation (SAGE) Pipeline and SAGE Terminal System. Prior to engaging EnergySys in 2019, the company relied on an aging system that was no longer able to perform critical functions for its business. “We built a whole infrastructure around that system to support it, including spreadsheets and custom databases,” says Ross Matthews, hydrocarbon accounting lead at Ancala Midstream. “We engaged EnergySys to replace those obsolete systems and have one central environment that could handle all of our requirements.”

EnergySys was highly recommended to Ancala Midstream. The company trusted that the software could help it comply with commercial obligations and automate key tasks such as reporting—and was proven right. For example, Ancala Midstream built business intelligence dashboards that automatically display data to its stakeholders, shippers, and suppliers. It no longer needs to manually generate over 1,000 reports and instead provides a simple self-service environment for its users.

Using the cloud-native EnergySys environment, Ancala Midstream can also scale to adapt to changes, such as more assets being added to the SAGE System and emerging regulatory requirements. It can deploy new features and updates across the system in accordance with these changes and configure innovative applications to meet its business needs. For example, sustainability is a major priority for the oil and gas industry, and Ancala Midstream has a goal to reach net-zero carbon emissions. Using EnergySys, it developed an application that tracks the carbon emissions of its SAGE assets. Ancala Midstream, as well as its suppliers and shippers, can monitor and better understand its carbon footprint. “For our companies to get to net zero, we have to understand what our emissions are,” says Matthews. “EnergySys is the starting point for achieving this goal.”

Improving Efficiency for the Oil and Gas Industry Using the Cloud

EnergySys develops powerful solutions that help oil and gas companies be more agile, scalable, and adaptable. In the future, it plans to add new features to help its customers better manage thousands of data points and manage critical functions, such as detecting anomalies in its asset performance and predicting maintenance needs.

For Ancala Midstream, its future plans involve optimizing its asset management system and developing more advanced applications to handle bespoke customer agreements. EnergySys will continue to be a central part of operations. “We’ve had EnergySys software for under 2 years, but we’ve already thrown some pretty tough tasks at it,” says Matthews. “It’s handled these challenges very well.”