bpx energy Transforms Production Operations Through AWS Energy Industry Solutions

bpx energy is bp’s US onshore oil and gas production business, part of its resilient and focused hydrocarbons portfolio, a key component of its strategy to become an integrated energy company and to be net zero by 2050 or sooner. bpx energy chose AWS as the strategic cloud platform of choice for Operational Technology stack (OT) for security, performance, and innovation agility. They have been operating their supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system, Historian, and Remote Terminal Units (RTU) on AWS. In the first quarter of 2021, bpx energy deployed the AWS Production Monitoring and Surveillance solution to further enhance business value through real-time intelligence.

In this two-part blog post series, we explain various components of the AWS Production Monitoring and Surveillance solution. This post dives deep into the overall benefits to bpx energy.

bpx energy identified an opportunity to consolidate data sources and democratize data access by increasing data granularity across the business. Previously, they used a data warehouse solution, which lacked several key features. For example, business operations teams require timely data to have visibility into how their assets are performing in near real-time, rather than waiting for a business report the next day. Business teams also require high granularity, high fidelity, and up-to-the-second data for machine learning solutions.

The centralization of the systems and the simplification of access to those systems is really important from security and safety perspectives because it reduces safety risk through better governance. Overall, bpx energy sees a 45% reduction in IT and OT Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

Additionally, for bpx energy, wellhead pressure anomaly detection at high frequencies is a priority. System pressure can tell the bpx energy team a lot about what is going on with a well, but substantive analysis is only useful at higher frequencies. The AWS Production Monitoring and Surveillance solution enables bpx energy to solve these issues.

Solution overview

The following reference architecture shows the overall solution, with the Industrial Machine Connectivity (IMC) highlighted in orange below.

bpx energy Production Monitoring and Surveillance Reference architecture

IMC on AWS helps energy customers and partners accelerate digital transformation. It brings data from Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) assets to AWS in a structured way. Customers can extract insights from their OT data, increase efficiency, and reduce operational costs. IMC is for developers, regional and global systems integrators (SI), independent software vendors (ISV), and original equipment manufacturers (OEM) who want to generate business value from an IIoT architecture. ISV partners provide edge software and cloud native applications that can extract data from OT data stores to generate insights. SI partners bring implementation experience to customers and further develop custom applications to meet their unique needs.

During bpx energy implementation, we worked with partner solutions and teams to unlock data from proprietary applications and data silos. The cloud native solution integrated OT and IT for value-added analytical use cases. Data eventually lands in the Industrial Data Lake (IDL), shown on the right half of the architecture. The IDL implements a Lake House architecture on AWS, using an “inside-out” approach, where data in the data lake is ingested into purpose-built data stores for analytics. For example, the IDL implementation uses Amazon Timestream, a time series database that enables customers to derive deeper insights from their industrial data through time series analytics using SQL.

Amazon Timestream is a purpose-built managed time series database service for IoT and operational applications that makes it easy to store and analyze trillions of events per day. It saves time and cost in managing the lifecycle of time series data by keeping recent data in memory and moving historical data to a cost optimized storage tier based upon user defined policies. Amazon Timestream also has built-in time series analytics functions, helping customers identify data trends and patterns in near real-time. bpx energy uses Timestream to store time series data from IoT devices and from packaged OT software solutions.

Implementation partner teams included Embassy of Things (EoT) and TensorIoT. EoT deployed their ETL++ Operational Data Delivery Software System “TwinTalk” at bpx energy. TwinTalk extracts raw data tag values from the source SCADA system, enhances it with contextual meta data, and delivers it to AWS native services such as AWS IoT SiteWise and Amazon S3 via data pipelines in near real-time.

TensorIoT implemented the AWS IMC backend architecture including AWS IoT SiteWise. AWS IoT SiteWise is a managed service that makes it easy to collect, store, organize, and monitor data from industrial equipment at scale. AWS IoT SiteWise ingests metadata from TwinTalk. Based on TwinTalk’s meta data repository, AWS IoT SiteWise creates asset models and hierarchies reflecting bpx energy physical sites including attributes, measurements, and properties. AWS IoT SiteWise improves multi-site, multi-asset near real-time streaming data collection. It stores data in the hierarchy and visualizes data for operators via built-in operational dashboards. This set of features quickly enable bpx energy to monitor remote operations. AWS IoT SiteWise integrates with native AWS IoT services such as AWS IoT Core and IoT Rules that can send data to IDL for higher-level analytics and machine learning use cases.

Conclusion

In this blog, we described key benefits of the AWS Production Monitoring and Surveillance solution to our launch customer, bpx energy. The solution aggregates data from thousands of wells and sensors across multiple geographic locations into a central location for analytics and machine learning. Business and technical operations have increased data granularity to create near-real-time dashboard. It gives customers the opportunity to get away from legacy morning reports on the next day and see where production operations are at any point during the day. It unlocks the capability for customers to be proactive about operations and avoid downtime interruptions through maintenance.

We also presented the overall reference architecture for the Production Monitoring and Surveillance solution in this blog. Specifically, we discussed one solution component: AWS IMC. AWS and partner teams, including EoT and TensorIoT, jointly helped bpx energy achieve business objectives.

For more information, please check out our subsequent blog in this series. We explain the rest of the solution and dive deeper into the technical implementations. To learn more about how you can transform the core and build the future of your energy business, see AWS Energy.