Shell is developing digital twins across its Deepwater business to streamline capital projects and cut time to production of first oil. The company has picked Bentley to implement the programme, using its iTwin platform.

The oil company has several subsea tie-back projects over the next 10 years that it plans to deliver. To help it achieve this, the company has decided on implementing an integrated digital project and engineering environment.

“Shell Deepwater Projects is developing an integrated Workflow and Data Platform from system selection to asset handover to streamline our capital projects processes and accelerate time to first oil,” said GT Ju, General Manager Gulf of Mexico Deepwater Projects. “The platform is being developed in partnership with Bentley leveraging Bentley’s iTwin open, scalable Azure cloud-based platform which provides interoperability across owner and supply chain systems. We believe that an end-to-end platform that gives us visibility and transparency to Project and Engineering data across our portfolio will be a key driver to delivering competitive projects.”

Nicholas Cumins, Chief Product Officer Bentley Systems, said “Bentley’s iTwin platform is ideally suited to providing aligned, secure and visual access to project data across the supply chain and capital projects ecosystem. Shell’s selection of Bentley’s iTwin platform validates our open approach to digital twins and underscores the ability of the platform to scale to the largest, most complex capital projects and dynamic engineering use cases.”

In addition, Bentley announced that it is providing investment funds to FutureOn, a Norwegian software company supporting deepwater subsea projects, to accelerate going digital within the oil and gas industry. The investment sets the stage for FutureOn and Bentley to deliver the digital twin technology required for oil and gas ecosystems to manage and analyse data, integrate with existing systems, provide analytics visibility, and rapidly explore ideas collaboratively.

FutureOn will combine its field design application (FieldAP) and its API-centric collaboration platform (FieldTwin) with Bentley’s digital twin platform (iTwin) to advance user organisations like Shell Deepwater. Both FutureOn and Bentley platforms use open web standards to support complex integration and customisation, and the combined offerings are already being implemented in exploration and production workflows for the creation and curation of subsea digital twins.