Shell to use Bentley Systems’ digital twins to speed up capital projects

Shell’s Deepwater business has selected Bentley Systems’ digital twin solutions to streamline its capital projects process and accelerate time to first oil.

Bentley Systems said that Shell, with a plan to deliver several subsea tie-back projects over the next 10 years, recognized the opportunity to accelerate capital project delivery and cut project delivery time by implementing an integrated digital project and engineering environment.

According to the company, the solution spans project conception in the early phase design through to handover.

GT Ju, general manager Gulf of Mexico deepwater projects, said: “Shell Deepwater Projects is developing an integrated workflow and data platform from system selection to asset handover to streamline our capital projects processes and accelerate time to first oil.

“The platform is being developed in partnership with Bentley leveraging its iTwin open, scalable Azure cloud-based platform which provides interoperability across owner and supply chain systems”.

Nicholas Cumins, chief product officer at Bentley Systems, added: “Bentley’s iTwin platform is ideally suited to providing aligned, secure and visual access to project data across the supply chain and capital projects ecosystem.

“Shell’s selection of Bentley’s iTwin platform validates our open approach to digital twins and underscores the ability of the platform to scale to the largest, most complex capital projects and dynamic engineering use cases”.

Along with the cooperation with Shell, Bentley Systems stated that it was investing in FutureOn, a Norwegian software company supporting deepwater subsea projects, to accelerate going digital within the oil and gas industry.

“The investment sets the stage for FutureOn and Bentley to deliver the next-generation digital twin technology required for oil and gas ecosystems to manage and analyze data, integrate with existing systems, provide analytics visibility, and rapidly explore ideas collaboratively”, the company said.

FutureOn CEO Paal Roppen said: “The Bentley Acceleration Fund investment is a significant milestone for FutureOn and will help drive the growth of our business by advancing the FutureOn technology as well as extending our reach.

“Today, digitalization is more important than ever for the oil and gas industry as challenging market conditions persist. Innovative and disruptive digital twin technologies such as those we develop alongside Bentley will help farsighted organizations like Shell Deepwater to improve project and asset performance”.