The oil and gas industry has evolved. Time stands still for no one. Experience has taught us that.
“We used to call it our refining and petrochemicals vertical, but as I listen to customers, they’re all trying to integrate sustainability,” said Tathagata Basu, global head and general manager of what is now the sustainable fuels and chemicals vertical for Honeywell Process Solutions.
The industry started 100 years ago processing crude to make liquid fuel for transportation, explained Basu in a presentation at this week’s 2024 Honeywell Users Group meeting in Dallas. Some of the leading players have moved more toward chemicals. A lot of refineries have moved from fuels to aromatics. Then came the revelation of making fuels more sustainable. Ethanol became a feedstock.
The status quo has since been interrupted by the electrification of cars, by geopolitics and by companies’ net-zero goals. “Refiners need to design and implement an ‘&’ strategy for business resilience,” explained Basu, who cited the United States’ relationships with Russia and China, refineries retrofitting for sustainable-aviation-fuel (SAF) biodiesel, methanol and other fuels and the electrification wave as drivers of the need for manufacturers to be flexible.
Added flexibility means complexity, too
“But flexibility leads to complexity,” warned Basu. “The more flexible you want your operations to be, the more complex they become.” Increased span of control, supply-chain agility, complex operating windows and decarbonization mandates are creating more complex environments.
“Complexity dictates the new digital journey that we are now seeing industry evolve into,” explained Basu. Operators are still working in a situationally aware environment, much like how we were using MapQuest 20 years ago to get from Point A to Point B. But they’re moving toward being future-ready, cited Basu. “AI-based options like Waze can tell you what the future looks like, giving you different options, telling you about possible delays or stoppages,” he said.
“At no point are we advocating for autonomy in the process plant,” Basu stressed. “Effective human-AI teaming facilitates better performance than humans alone or machines alone.”
Intelligent operations combine process knowledge with digital technology and AI. “We are trying to deliver an AI-assisted, fully empowered, future-ready operator to ensure the safety and security of people, environment and assets plus optimized and reliable performance,” said Basu.
He illustrated what he calls the “intelligence staircase,” with appropriate Honeywell technology aligned to each step. “Everybody starts from somewhere,” said Basu. Each stair increases the level of intelligence, as well as increasing the business value. On the Integrate step is the Experion PKS Highly Integrated Virtual Hive (HIVE), which is infinitely scalable and redundant, ubiquitous and comes cybersecure. Experion Cockpit’s descriptive analytics are found on both the second Illustrate step and the third Interpret step. “It’s how you see data,” Basu explained. The fourth step, Insightful, is where Forge.ai lands with its predictive and prescriptive platform.
According to Basu, these technologies readily accounted for $10 million in construction savings, 5% improvements in utilization and availability, a 10% reduction in operation deviations and doubled operator productivity at one of Honeywell’s customers, a refinery producing 300,000 barrels per day.
“We’re trying to package sets of software in Experion,” Basu explained. HMI Pack, for example, is software to tell operators how they’re operating today—what state is the plant operating at? HMI Pack includes contextualized graphics, intelligent alarms and trends plus a limit repository.
Meanwhile, Asset Pack takes information from critical assets and presents it to operators so they can take proactive actions. It uses wireless technology to sense data in the field. Versatilis equipment health monitoring, asset performance management and Digital Video Manager are part of Asset Pack.
Safety Pack detects leaks and presents them to operators. Honeywell technologies in play include Rebellion spectral gas-cloud imaging, Versatilis Signal Scout methane detectors and the Safety Watch real-time location system.
Finally, Process Pack gives operators advice. “Process Pack is our augmented, look-ahead tool,” explained Basu. It includes autonomous procedures, look-ahead runway and Experion Operations Assistant, which features electronic work instructions, a dynamic watchlist, scheduled and predicted events, advisories and assisted troubleshooting, such as control-loop tuning.
To avoid hallucinations in the assisted-troubleshooting investigation, the system also gives source information, in addition to recommendations, so the operator can make decisions on when to apply recommendations versus making their own decisions based on the information.
“There are a lot of opportunities, but I want to highlight the risks,” warned Basu. “You have to avoid unforeseen situations. AI is ultimately deciding based on historical information. If something has never happened before, it has no information to make a decision. You can make the system tell you that, so you can at least make an intelligent decision yourself.”
