Energy Management - Data Centric Approach

Improve your triple bottom line

Electricity cost in upstream, midstream and downstream processes are one of the largest controllable operating expenses. Not only consuming less electricity is environmentally friendly but also it impacts EBIDTA. Energy management and optimization is one of Integra’s focus areas for modelling and analytics due to its triple bottom-line impact.

The complexity in managing energy is due to changing operating conditions, variations in processes, and differences in design of the plant and equipment specifications. In addition human factors (e.g. operators experience, style) and organization’s production goals and obligations add to this complexity.

For example, the extraction process in upstream (e.g. in Oil Sands) is impacted by the ore quality and in our experience ore quality at best is an average of averages from mine surveys. In downstream steam ratio is a key factor in determining energy usage, and in midstream pump stations play a critical role in moving the products but not all pumps are made equal and products vary in density, temperature, and other attributes. So how can we understand, measure and control the varying conditions that impact the energy usage?

There are a few approaches that we will touch on here briefly and could work in different scenarios:

• Engineering centric approach takes use of hydraulics and pump efficiency curves to determine the most efficient operating conditions for the pump. However, optimizing one pump or one station does not optimize the whole system. What might make one station efficient, might increase the cost at another station.

Data Centric Approach: Optimizing the whole system using machine learning

• Software centric approach uses known elements such as energy rates, flows, etc. to optimize the process, however the software approach takes time to deploy, requires training, change management, maintenance, lock in, and it won’t optimize the whole system nor does it take into consideration the operator or external factors

• Data centric approach uses existing engineering, operating, and maintenance data to understand, measure and control all the variables including everything we know from design, operations, maintenance, people, etc.

Integra Data and Analytic solutions is an AI/ML service provider focused on energy industry. We help organizations accelerate their data driven initiatives using proven industry use cases in predictive maintenance, asset integrity, energy management, production optimization and health and safety. To learn more about how you can accelerate their AI/ML journey request a demo of this solution.