Imagine taking nondestructive testing (NDT) technology from the healthcare industry and using it to “fingerprint” BOPs. Or imagine taking a control system platform from the wind energy business for a very strong control system on the safety-critical equipment in the drilling industry. Imagine a companywide store concept that leverages things that come from the healthcare business, business models from the transportation or aviation business and material science that comes either from the aviation or turbomachinery business.

That’s what GE Oil & Gas has in development along with other GE companies across many businesses aimed at technology transfer. The GE Store is a concept where innovation is leveraged from all GE businesses, explained Chuck Chauviere, president of drilling systems, GE Oil & Gas.

Driving standardization, analytics
At the GE Oil & Gas annual meeting on Feb. 1-2 in Florence, Italy, many of the operators at the meeting were saying that a great deal of optionality has been introduced into all of the deepwater solutions. That optionality has attracted challenges that impact cost and serviceability as well as the ability to replicate and leverage what was learned, Chauviere said.

“The industry is going to drive in a much stronger standardized way. To help with the service and cost equations, we need to have a very strong, structured product to solve the deepwater challenges. We have one big equation where we’re working on structuring and standardizing the product so we can make it even more robust and apply that to the industry,” he emphasized.

“The second piece is around analytics and data. The analytics or the data are going to come in multiple forms—collecting basic usage data on the equipment and then also getting the environmental and the fleet elements associated with those data such that we can feed that back into the structured product to increase overall equipment performance,” he continued.

The theme for GE’s conference this year for drilling was around how the industry drives productivity using technology, data and collaboration in different commercial models. People across the industry recognize that something different has to be done. That something different includes the primary pillars of being smarter with data, structuring and commercial models that can all
improve the way value is delivered, he added.

One new commercial offering is a first-of-its-kind engageDrilling Services model announced with Diamond Offshore where the full accountability for BOP performance is transferred to GE Oil & Gas. In this model Diamond Offshore will compensate GE Oil & Gas only when the BOP is available, incentivizing reduced downtime and improved BOP system reliability.

“We have launched a site as well as a services platform called ‘engageDrilling.’ We’re trying to be successful at closing the white space between a customer request and the customer getting an answer to that request.

“We realize that to be contemporary and to pull all this together, we need to be a much simpler and more efficient organization. So we’ve launched engageDrilling. In there you can actually see your orders progress through our factory. You can place orders. You can research deliveries and prices. You can see what your history was, if there are engineering bulletins on the
equipment and if you have your data books associated with the equipment. We have online videos on how to work on the equipment,” Chauviere explained.

“Effectively anything you can imagine with regard to the customer-OEM relationship we have put onto the engageDrilling.com site. They can see their rigs. They can see where their assets are located. When they’re connected with the SeaLytics package, they can actually pull up what their rigs are doing and how they’re performing,”
he continued.

NDT technology from healthcare business
“An example of leveraging our ‘GE Store’ of technology solutions is using what is going on in the healthcare business for [NDT] technology for BOPs. What we’re doing now will benefit not only the operators but the drilling contractors. How can you minimize the inspection requirements for a system in a way that can leave the equipment assembled and just perform the 4-D digital fingerprinting in situ inspection at regular intervals to monitor how the equipment is changing over time? The in situ inspection is something that we’re leveraging from the healthcare business,” he said.

“A rough example of that is on some of the older units that we’ve inspected offshore where we’ve been able to reduce inspection time by 75% by leaving the equipment in place and using this inspection technology. That way we don’t have to disassemble the equipment to perform the inspection. That’s just a great example of how we leverage what we’re doing in other industries to drive productivity, reduce the cost and decrease the intrusive amount of inspection time,” he continued.

“Obviously, the fourth dimension is going to be change over time. Digital fingerprinting is our simple word for effectively getting a fingerprint of the equipment. Then at periodic intervals we can run this technology to monitor how it changes over time.”

That is used to feed predictive or condition-based maintenance. Based on what is known of the environment, where the equipment is being run and how it’s being used, those data can be used on the backbone of GE’s Predix package, which is where SeaLytics runs. The company can then begin to predict the performance of the equipment as opposed to just doing
maintenance based on either cycle counts or calendars.

GE’s industrial Internet
GE is a digital industrial company working on an industrial Internet for all of its businesses. Industrial apps at users’ fingertips will be run on the back of Predix. This will be used in all GE businesses including turbomachinery, aviation, healthcare, and oil and gas. “This is something that GE has been investing in over the last three years in San Ramon, Calif. We have a software center there that is a sizable investment, in the range of about $1 billion. We do believe that to be truly an industrial company in the future, companies have to go digital,” he emphasized.

“We have developed a cloud-based and very cybersecure space where we are framing this backbone, which is called Predix. It is where we will store all the data. On top of that, we’ll run these applications that we’re going to have through SeaLytics,” he added. “This is that concept of leveraging the GE Store across the businesses.”

The SeaLytics package will use Predix, which is an upfront open architecture. “We’re going to encourage our clients and others to help develop the applications that we can all utilize to improve their personal relationship with the equipment and, even better, where the equipment actually talks to one another,” he explained.

For example, SeaLytics will feed off the BOP sensors and the BOP control system. It will capture the information, process that information and display it to the user both on the rig and onshore. The operator can look at its entire fleet from onshore and do its own remote assessments of asset performance.

Robust control system from power generation sector
The SeaONYX BOP control system is another example where GE has infused technology that is used in the power generation sector. “We’ve taken a control system platform that uses our Mark VIe controller pack, which is normally utilized to control the end range of 40,000 to 50,000 datapoints. We’re using it in the drilling application, which is something less than 2,000 datapoints. We’re using a very robust control system to go to the field and upgrade clients such that we can have a very strong control system on safety critical equipment,” Chauviere said.

When SeaONYX is connected to the SeaLytics package, an operator can really start to gain the ability to obtain data and to control the system in an enhanced way. That is how BOP availability is increased, he emphasized.

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