Depth of Knowledge: New Industrial Internet System Can Monitor Deep Sea Drilling Equipment

Blowout preventers, or BOPs, are among the biggest and most complex machines that most of us will never see. These 50,000-pound 60-foot-tall safety valves made from 70,000 component parts sit on top of pressurized oil and gas wells thousands of feet below the surface of the ocean. They serve as the last line of defense if something in the well goes wrong.

Many BOP parts have different lifespans and the massive machines have to be periodically pulled up and serviced. Workers perform much of the maintenance on a BOP at set time intervals because real-time information about the condition of the parts and usage is sparse. That information gap got a team of GE oil and gas engineers and software developers thinking: “We need to move from the ‘break-fix’ model to a maintenance model where we can advise customers to service a component based on measurements of its performance,” says Bob Judge, director of product management at GE Oil & Gas. “What if you had technology gathering BOP data so that the next time you pull it out, you know exactly what needs to be replaced and have the replacement parts available on the drilling rig? This information could save millions of dollars in unplanned downtime, adding substantial value for our customers and for their customers.”

BOPs are 50,000-pound 60-foot-tall safety valves made from 70,000 component parts. They serve as the last line of defense if something in the well goes wrong.

The team spent the last couple of years studying data from existing BOP controls systems and came up with the Drilling iBox solution. This combination of software and hardware sensors allows drilling rig crews to gather data about valve positions, pressures, temperatures and well bore conditions and turn it into useful information. “The screen of the D-iBox is showing the workers the health of the BOP components, how many cycles they have gone through, and what needs to be fixed and when,” Judge says. “When there is a problem, the drilling contractor will know within seconds.”

Judge said that he had an epiphany when he saw a demonstration of myEngines, an Industrial Internet application for GE’s Aviation business. It allows airlines to remotely monitor the status of their engine fleet and streamline scheduling, maintenance and repair. “I thought if we could substitute “BOP” for “engine”, we could use the same model to benefit the drilling industry that has been proven to work for jet engines,” Judge says.

The first D-iBox pilot will start this fall and two others by the first quarter of 2014. . Only drilling contractors and owners will have access to data collected by the system. But Judge points out that there are significant advantages to encouraging data-sharing with GE. “Gathering data across different users will accelerate the types of predictive rules our software engineers can create,” he says.

Judge says that "everyone benefits when we can advise replacement or maintenance intervals based on the widest universe of user data possible. We can also see this type of operational data as an important piece of the whole cradle-to-grave genealogy of the components of a BOP system."

"Telling a customer what to fix after it has failed is relatively easy," he says. "Telling them to fix something before it costs them money is the magic.”