Energizing performance in the oilfield with an
operations digital twin

The concept of digital twins is revolutionizing asset management and all activities in the oil and gas industry. By providing a complete 360-degree model of physical assets, having a digital twin enables companies to optimize their operations and improve well-delivery performance like never before.

Let’s take a closer look at how digital twins are changing the game for oil and gas operators. 

In this post:

• What is a digital twin?
• Scheduling software as a digital twin
• Redefining scheduling software

What is a digital twin?

A digital twin is a virtual model of physical on-field operational assets, such as rigs, frac spreads, construction crews inspection crews, pumps, compressors, tank batteries, and pipelines. Digital twin technology optimizes efficiency through the analysis of detailed and accurate simulation of operations, leading to reduced costs and improved resource utilization.

A unified model that integrates both the present state and potential future operations scenarios, a digital twin platform facilitates swift modeling and analysis of intricate, large-scale operations models, surpassing the capabilities of conventional tools. As a result, digital twins can seamlessly align with ongoing operations or swiftly perform comprehensive operations optimization, involving thousands of permutations, within a few minutes. This technology is particularly helpful in providing clear visibility and flexibility in operations, preventing the loss of millions of dollars due to loss of productivity.

Scheduling software as a digital twin

A scheduling solution for upstream operations that captures vast amounts of important data, DSO/Upstream software rapidly and easily creates an operational digital twin. Together with its AI-powered optimization engine DSO enables oil and gas companies to automatically assign resources to activities in an optimal sequence, rapidly and reliably, allowing workflows to be optimized, identifying bottlenecks, and improving operational efficiency.

By capturing and making available key information associated with a drilling program schedule, DSO/Upstream creates a highly effective operational model that allows the exploration of multiple scenarios, enabling the potential impact of operational or resource changes and their impacts on the program, production forecasts, capital budget, and more. It’s easy to ask questions and get answers to questions such as:

1. How might operations be changed to be more efficient and more effective?
2. What if we added a rig in the fourth quarter?
3. What if we added a frac crew in the second quarter? 
4. What if we changed the way we are drilling and used different rigs: what would the costs and payoffs be?

Redefining scheduling software

While AI-powered DSO/Upstream is known for optimizing complex operations by automating and streamlining the scheduling process, considering various constraints, dependencies, and business rules, it provides much more than simple scheduling capabilities. Instead of a schedule with dates, activities, and assignments, DSO/Upstream can blend into that model data from other areas of interest. For example, it’s easy to incorporate production, costs, and emissions forecasting.

A second digital revolution

From concept to completed well and beyond, digital twin technology provides one of the biggest opportunities today for performance optimization. It could very well be the start of a second digital revolution. The companies that adopt it first will be poised to reap its benefits. And DSO/Upstream leads the way in digital twin technology for drilling programs.

To energize your company’s performance in the oilfield with your digital twin, contact us at info@actenum.com or request a demo.