ABB and Equinor implementing digital monitoring on North Sea platform

Swedish technology company ABB and Norway’s Equinor have joined forces to implement digital and remote condition monitoring to the critical electrical systems of the Gina Krog platform off Norway.

ABB said on Wednesday it has begun a pilot project with Equinor at the Gina Krog platform, which is located in the North Sea. The field has been producing oil and gas since June 2017.

The project enables a digital transformation of monitoring of critical electrical systems on the platform, accelerating Equinor’s condition monitoring capabilities with a focus on improving safety, reducing operational costs, and increasing production efficiency, ABB said.

Adopting a collaborative maintenance model enables Equinor to start the journey from today’s planned maintenance program towards prescriptive maintenance.

According to ABB, data will be transferred from the platform’s power management system and electrical condition monitoring system to Equinor’s OMNIA Microsoft Azure cloud platform, using an onsite ABB EdgeInsight data pump.

From here, live data will be securely streamed to ABB’s own Microsoft Azure cloud where a dedicated team will utilize the data to continuously improve condition monitoring technology and tools to be used by ABB’s Reliability Service team.

By streaming data directly to ABB, Equinor is securely transporting high-level information from assets that will deliver transparency on performance, better predictability, and process optimization, ABB explained.

Per Erik Holsten, Head of Energy Industries for Northern Europe at ABB commented: “By collaborating with Equinor in this way, we will make sure that they have real-time electrical equipment health visibility. In addition, we are contributing to meeting reliability performance targets and reducing the cost of interruptions”.

As the pilot progresses, ABB will take over day-to-day condition monitoring operations for the critical electrical equipment, to be managed offsite by ABB’s Reliability Service team.

This will be done in close co-operation with Gina Krog personnel and Equinor’s Integrated Operations Center (IOC). ABB engineers will work inside Equinor’s Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, helping with generation of notifications.

Vice President Operations, Bernt E. Tysseland, from Equinor said: “Through this project and collaboration we can utilize operations data in a much leaner and faster way. By allowing ABB’s experts to work digitally alongside Equinor personnel we can improve safety and reduce maintenance administration hours”.

Once onboarded, ABB and Equinor will jointly investigate the opportunity to apply the same approach for other relevant equipment.

Holsten finished: “The COVID-19 pandemic, alongside the global drive towards more sustainable operations, has highlighted the importance of building resilience and enabling adaptability within operational models”.