The autonomous plant: Entering a new digital era
The requirements of the energy transition present significant industry challenges. Energy companies must embrace new technologies, transform management systems, and expand workforce capabilities.
By Gopal Chakrabarti, Dominik Don, Micah Smith, and Premal Vora – Energy companies are operating in uncertain times. They face societal pressure and increased regulation to significantly reduce fossil-fuel dependency, primarily characterized by reliance on transport fuels, plastics, and other refining and petrochemical products. Under these conditions, companies are looking to maximize the health and resilience of downstream operations—particularly in oil and gas and chemicals—by adopting new automation and digital technologies, enabling increased levels of data usage and performance transparency, as well as faster decision loops.
Many of these changes were already occurring and have only accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic, resulting in a newfound sense of urgency. Yet digital strategies remain challenging for the energy sector for several reasons, namely keeping up with increased decarbonization efforts, workforce changes, and accelerated technological innovations. Many companies have responded with short-term solutions but remain indecisive about how to identify priorities in the years to come.
Autonomous plants are a promising solution. Such future plants link technology, data, and advanced visualizations with operations to ensure that assets learn from each action taken, as well as from historical data and derived insights. These plants react to asset health and economic conditions and progressively improve their operations over time to run with a lower carbon footprint as well as more safely and more profitably.
Our research shows that all plants, irrespective of their maturity levels, are primed to identify and adopt digital technologies to move toward autonomy. The building blocks are now in place, the technologies are available, and the required skill sets are coming into focus. more>
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