Five tips to boost digitalisation in marine sectors
The COVID-19 pandemic has been a catalyst for the adoption of digital technology in marine sectors. With on-board testing and maintenance made impossible due to travel restrictions, and vessels located all around the world, remote solutions via, for example, digital twins have plugged the gap.
Against this backdrop, five experts met to participate in an IMarEST panel discussion, On the Radar: Digitalisation in Subsea Operations & Marine Assets, held in association with SeaFlo Consultancy Ltd.
Panellists discussed the use of digital twins in the transition to clean energy, as well as the skills required as the trend for greater digitalisation of marine and subsea assets continues. Here are five key lessons from the session.
To get value from digitalisation, be clear on your objectives
To make the most of your digital investments, “Be very clear and precise in what you are looking for,” said Kjell Eriksson, vice president, digital partnering, at DNV GL. “Don’t think, ‘I have all this data, what can I do now?’, which is how some digital initiatives start. They normally take off on an expensive tangent.”
Instead, Eriksson advised, operators should ask, “What kind of data quality do I need for [my] particular application? Sensors drift, signals will be interrupted, so what kind of demands do I put on my sensor system? Then the sensors have to be calibrated for the kind of calculations you want to do, and the kind of decisions you want to make.”
Eriksson also stressed the importance of changing the way we work. “There is little value in investing in a sophisticated digital solution if you are not able to change the way you work, which is about capturing the minds of the people on board and taking advantage of an AI solution that may scan vast amounts of data much faster than a human being.”
The benefits go beyond improved efficiencies
“Time, costs, safety and operational excellence are all improved with remote technologies,” said Mitch Johnson, programme manager, shipboard technical services, at Oceaneering.
“Scheduling is really difficult these days. Sometimes you only have small windows when you can do inspections. With technology and bandwidth becoming more available, these scheduling challenges can be mitigated with just a flip of a switch, so we can just turn up the bandwidth and turn on remote viewing at your convenience.”
Time savings, Johnson said, have a corresponding impact on costs: “Not having people travel offshore spending time on a day rate, not spending money on plane tickets, not spending money on having someone in a hotel room in quarantine for a couple of weeks, all saves money.
“And from a safety standpoint, inherently, if you’re not sending people offshore, you are increasing safety. And then, as a bonus, you can increase your operational excellence by having your subject matter experts centrally managed and conduct these inspections from a central location. You can have your best people working around the world simultaneously.”
A reduction in global air travel brings obvious environmental benefits, but digitalisation can reduce marine operators’ carbon impact in other ways. “By being able to connect data from different sources, you will, through AI, be able to see patterns that otherwise you wouldn’t have seen,” said Eriksson, “so you can run your equipment much more energy-efficiently.”
Examples include data-driven routing of vessels to avoid adverse weather, and the determination of optimum time intervals for cleaning vessels. “You will see patterns that will enable you to operate more efficiently and improve the impact we have on the climate and CO2 emissions,” said Eriksson.
We need to overcome the fear of the unknown
Operators who have a system that’s working may not want to be told that something needs to change. The challenge, then, is overcoming a fear of change and emphasising data’s role in increasing efficiencies by creating the opportunity to minimise any downtime in the future.
“For companies, I think it’s about changing the conversation to ensure that what you’re getting for the work that you’re putting in is greater sustainability and greater costs savings over the duration and field life of the asset, as opposed to [focusing on] the short-term costs requirements for augmentation or changes,” said John Butler CEng CMarEng FIMarEST, director, energy transition and sustainability, at Transition Ignition.
A perceived fear of job losses is another barrier to greater digitalisation, panellists said. “With new technology, there’s always an aversion towards it,” said Kaj Lagstrom FIMarEST, principle marine consultant and technical advisor at SeaFlo Consultancy Ltd. “People are scared that they will become obsolete. It’s a question of education, training and managing human behaviour so they understand the benefits of it. In most cases, it’s not a question of them losing their jobs, it’s just combining their experience with modern technology, driving the change for improved safety and improved economics, and allowing them to better plan their offshore work.”
Training is essential
The panellists agreed on the vital importance of training in ensuring digitalisation is successful.
“Operations and maintenance personnel need to overcome their aversion or fear of digitalisation, and this can be achieved through training,” said Lagstrom. “Training will also assist with minimising risks of losing highly experienced engineers and technicians from the industry. We have a good pool of engineers and technicians in the oil and gas industry working offshore with tremendous practical experience, and it’s essential that we train them so they can understand digitalisation and digital twins.”
In addition to upskilling the existing workforce, Butler highlighted the importance of training for new entrants to the industry. “We need to make sure that technology graduates and students recognise the potential in the energy industry, and they understand the benefits of the upstream or offshore and marine environment for digitalisation. We have to ensure that we get that continuation of fresh minds and fresh thinking in from universities, colleges and apprenticeships.”
The future is already here
“Sometimes we think about digitalisation as being this future-focused thing,” said Butler, “but actually, the future is now. A lot of this equipment, data and technology is already here. It’s about seeking out what digital technology you need and adopting it.”
Johnson added that Oceaneering has been operating remote technologies since 2018, but there were few early adopters. “What it really took to sink in was the pandemic; you physically cannot send people offshore anymore, and then a lightbulb went on: ‘Oh, why have we been doing this forever?’ Really, it’s been an enforced scenario, but now it’s popular.”
However, the panel sounded a note of warning that organisations should not feel the need to implement too much digital change at once.
“You don’t need to start with a 3D model of the complete North Sea,” said Peter Toxopeüs, project manager, fleet sustainability, at Fugro. “There are already datasets where, if you connect them, it’s called a digital twin. You can start small with a certain goal in mind and expand from there, whether that’s metocean data or maintenance data. It can then spread out [through the organisation] because you will see opportunities arise [adjacent] to the topic that you are exploring.”
“When you mobilise your organisation [on digitalisation] and get creativity going, suddenly you get flows of ideas,” Eriksson concluded. “It starts from the top and you may have to drive it, but when you get that realisation of what these tools can actually do, and what kind of quite mundane and boring tasks can be removed, then it gets powerful.”
View the full session On the Radar: Digitalisation in Subsea Operations & Marine Assets on demand here.