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.”

Thinking About the Box: Breakthrough CNG System Could Launch Energy Revolution

The history of Marshall in East Texas is rich with transportation lore. Several major stagecoach lines stopped there in the 1840s. The crucial Texas & Pacific Railway line originated in Marshall, tied it to major American cities and earned the town its Gateway to Texas sobriquet. But Marshall is still breaking new ground. Last fall the city opened a next-generation compressed natural gas (CNG) fueling station. The system, which was developed by GE, is the first node in a CNG network that could revolutionize transportation and travel, and set the U.S. on a road to energy independence.

GE’s Ujjwal Kumar calls this network the Internet of energy. “You cannot create an internet if you custom-design everything site by site,” says Kumar, who works as the general manager for unconventional solutions at GE Oil & Gas. “You need a common protocol, a standard technology.” He says that in the past truck and car fleet operators built their own CNG filling stations from scratch with off-the-shelf gas compressors, dispensers and other equipment. It wasn’t an ideal solution. “If you want to grow, you need to get scale in quality and reliability,” he says.

GE calls this new standard technology CNG In A Box*. The plug-and-play system, which is part of GE’s ecomagination portfolio, holds a motor, compressor, gas drier, gas cooler and other gear inside a standard 20-foot shipping container. It can be connected to municipal or transit gas pipelines pretty much anywhere. The box links to a GE Wayne dispenser that can pump out natural gas at a fast, six-gallons-per-minute clip. “All of these pieces of the technology are preconfigured and factory tested by GE,” Kumar says.

Today, there are seven units operating in the U.S., including the filling station in Marshall, and GE is delivering a new system for installation almost every week. China’s Endurance Industry recently signed an agreement to purchase 260 units and Canada’s Chelsea Natural Gas just ordered 20. GE sales teams have received calls from customers in the U.S., Europe, Russia and Israel.

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Ozinga Energy is a fourth-generation family business based in Chicago, Illinois. The company is using three CNG in A Box systems to power its fleet of several dozen new CNG concrete mixers. Ozinga’s CNG concrete trucks and the fueling systems have been financed by GE Capital. Credit: Ozinga Energy
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The plug-and-play system, which is part of GE’s ecomagination portfolio, holds a motor, compressor, gas drier, gas cooler and other gear inside a standard 20-foot shipping container. It can be connected to municipal or transit gas pipelines pretty much anywhere. The box connects to a GE Wayne dispenser that can pump out natural gas at a fast, six-gallons-per-minute clip. Credit: Ozinga Energy
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“All of these pieces of the technology are preconfigured and factory tested by GE,” says GE’s Ujjwal Kumar. “This is the beauty of the Internet of energy,” he says. “Because we can work at scale, the technology becomes predictable and makes it easier to order parts or secure financing and insurance.” Credit: Ozinga Energy
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CNG could reduce carbon emissions by a quarter per vehicle and fuel costs by as much as 40 percent, compared with gasoline. Credit: Ozinga Energy
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This is just the beginning of a larger movement, Kumar says. The technology could create a new ecosystem where other companies from banks to maintenance shops can play. “This is the beauty of the Internet of energy,” he says. “Because we can work at scale, the technology becomes predictable and makes it easier to order parts or secure financing and insurance.”

The benefits could be huge. CNG could reduce carbon emissions by a quarter per vehicle and fuel costs by as much as 40 percent, compared with gasoline. Even better, the energy expert and MacArthur “genius” Fellow Amory B. Lovins says that if we switched all heavy trucks from diesel to natural gas, it would be “the most important non-automotive way to get the nation off oil by 2050.”

*CNG in A Box is a registered trademark of GE Oil & Gas.

Shazam for Aquaman: GE System Listens For Leaky Subsea Wells

Thousands of feet under the North Sea, an array of transformers, choke manifolds, pumps and valves buzz and whir in an improvised subsea symphony. They play for a 500-pound electronic ear whose design is a closely guarded trade secret.

The ear sends the sound through an umbilical cable to a seaborne control room filled with computers and engineers dissecting every stray whoosh and hiss. They are listening for oil leaks, odd vibrations, strange cracks and other signs of trouble. “An acoustic signature from a piece of equipment is like a fingerprint from a human,” says Fabian Dawson, sales manager from GE Measurement and Control. “No two leaks or pumps are going to sound the same.” Call it Shazam for the seabed.



Dawson says that the system holds a library more than 100,000 sounds. “We can filter out the background noise, like marine life, and listen only to the things that we want to,” Dawson says. He says that the system is 10,000 times more accurate than traditional “mass balance” systems that measure differences in the amount of oil and gas flowing through the pipes to detect leaks.

GE engineers designed the eardrum of the system, which looks like a giant birdcage, from special crystals that respond to sound wave vibrations and convert them into electricity. (Engineers call this effect “piezoelectricity.”) One ear can listen to sounds within a 1,600 foot radius.

But the system does more than that. An array of attached carbon rods can detect changes in the electromagnetic field generated by electrical cables, pumps, motors and other electrical equipment, and spot ground faults or defective isolation. “You can determine the rpm of a compressor from the acoustic signal, and then you can determine how hard it is working from the electrical signal,” Dawson says. “Taken together, they will tell you what the efficiency is.”

Workers deploy the cage by lowering it down the side of a ship from a crane. They use ROVs to secure it to a piece of subsea equipment or to the sea floor. “It’s a simple, X-marks-the-spot procedure,” Dawson says.

The system is already working at some 130 sites in the North Sea operated by Statoil, ENI, and Shell, and off the coast of Africa. GE has now introduced it to American customers at the 2013 Offshore Technology Conference held this week in Houston.

The system is using powerful software and algorithms to make sense of the sounds. But like an elusive remix you’ve heard at a party, phantom noise can still creep in. “You are looking at correlations between the pieces of the equipment emitting both the electrical and the acoustic signals, and sometimes there is a signature there that you can’t trace.” Dawson says. “We call them rogue sounds.”

When that happens, the GE teams goes straight to the source, the engineers who built the equipment. “They are the experts,” Dawson says. “They know what their machines should sound like. They can recognize the rogue harmonics.”

Long-Distance Learning: When a Turbine Tripped on Nexen’s North Sea Oil Platform, GE Found the Cause from 500 Miles Away

Nexen’s Buzzard offshore complex is a system of three oil platforms anchored in the cold and choppy Atlantic some 62 miles northwest of Aberdeen, Scotland. Nexen, a Canadian energy company, designed the platforms to produce 200,000 barrels of oil per day, making the field one of the largest in the North Sea. But several years ago, one of Nexen’s three main power turbines generating Buzzard's electricity experienced a series of “trips” – or power fluctuations that result in a turbine shutdown, putting production in jeopardy.

Nexen, however, had equipped its turbines with GE's remote diagnostics software. A GE services team sitting 500 miles away quickly found the cause of the shutdowns and prevented severe equipment damage costing Nexen more that $10 million per day in lost oil output.

Remote Control: GE's Industrial Internet diagnostics system helped fix Buzzard's power turbine from 500 miles away.

The Buzzard turbines were monitored GE’s System 1 diagnostics software. The technology is part of GE’s Industrial Internet services solutions connecting people, data and machines. The software quickly gathered information from sensors inside the affected turbine and fed it for analysis to GE’s remote diagnostics centers in Aberdeen and the Netherlands. When GE service engineers went over the results, they noticed that some of the bearings sensors were reporting changes in temperature and voltage, tell-tale signs of bearing damage. A deeper analysis indicated that the control system in a lubricating pump was the likely culprit – a discovery that would not have been made until much later, or perhaps not at all, without accurate data about the exact time the incident occurred.

Acting on GE’s findings, Nexen fixed the bearing and corrected the pump's control system, solving the problem and averting potential damage and downtime. GE and Nexen estimate the System 1 technology has saved the energy company millions over the life of their service contract by detecting faults outside planned maintenance schedules, avoiding lost production, and mobilizing personnel and back-up equipment during outages. After GE helped fix the broken bearing, Nexen reviewed all of its rotating machinery to prevent similar accidents. The software has been monitoring machine vibrations, temperature, performance and emissions for machines ranging from gas turbines, compressors, pumps, fans and heat exchangers.

"Intelligent" service solutions like System 1 make good business sense. A new report from GE on the Industrial Internet estimates that by reducing capital expenditures by just 1 percent in the oil and gas sector, Industrial Internet systems and services could save the industry $90 billion over the next 15 years.

Chips Off the Old Block: Where Michelangelo Once Chiseled, GE Workers Build Engineering Marvels

For millennia artisans and craftsmen flocked to the coastal Tuscan town Carrara and scouted its famous marble quarries for the perfect stone. “Oh cursed a thousand times are the day and the hour when I left Carrara,” Michelangelo Buonarroti wrote to his brother 500 years ago. He made his David from Carrara marble, and died chiseling at a block of the same provenance. The marble is still there and so are the craftsmen. Many, however, don’t chisel stone, but weld steel. They are building some of the world’s largest and most complex engineering marvels: mobile power plants called power "modules."

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Carrara and the adjacent towns of Avenza and Massa are home to a pair of huge plants and testing fields for GE Oil & Gas. At Avenza, GE workers and engineers are working on five gigantic power modules for the Chevron-operated Gorgon Project, one of the world’s largest natural gas developments that is under construction off the northwest coast of Australia. The Greater Gorgon Area gas field holds an estimated 40 trillion cubic feet of gas. The power modules, each fitted out with a GE Frame 9 gas turbine, will supply the project with 650 megawatts of electricity used for compressing and cooling natural gas into liquid that can be shipped in supertankers to customers around the world. Chevron has ordered $1.8 billion from GE in machinery and services, including the Avenza power generators. Gorgon is an example of the "tremendous opportunities to grow" for GE's Oil & Gas business. "We've got the right stuff in the right places," Jeff Immelt, GE chairman and CEO told analysts in September. He expects the business to grow "double digits this year and next."

The first of the 90-foot modules, each big enough to cover half of a football field and weighing 2,300 tons, shipped for Australia aboard of a customized Japanese freighter Yamato last Friday. It took the module 4.5 hours to cover the 500-yard distance between the GE plant and the Marina di Carrara port. The behemoth rolled, centipede like, on 578 computerized wheels attached to four orange self-propelled transporters. At one point the module hugged a residential complex so close that a quarter would be too fat to pass between them.

The tight turn was just one of many unique obstacles facing the engineers. GE nearly tripled the size of the Avenza plant to build the modules. The company also quarantined the construction area. The Gorgon modules will generate power on Barrow Island, a pristine nature preserve, where Australian authorities imposed strict environmental regulations to prevent soil and wildlife contamination. As a result, GE workers and welders at the Avenza plant must walk through pressurized air cabins to clean their clothes every time they enter the building lot. An automatic system washes the soles of their shoes. No food or drink with the exception of bottled water is allowed in either. Each module takes more than a year to complete. Workers must apply six miles of structural welding to assemble the steel trusses that support each structure, and attach 12 miles of electric cable.

Some 3,700 people came to the port to see the module on its 12,400-mile journey. If the seas stay fair, the first module will disembark in Australia in 40 days. Its four brethren should ship out by the end of the third quarter next year.