Digital twins and predictive maintenance to increase efficiency at Repsol facilities
Business Insider reports that Repsol has extended its agreement with Microsoft until 2022 to accelerate the company’s digitization process. This alliance, which started in 2017, Repsol is the starting gun to work with data analysis, artificial intelligence, blockchain and other technologies. The company expects a return in the form of cash flow of € 1 billion until 2022 and an additional € 300 million until 2020. Repsol continues to strengthen ties with Microsoft.
The oil company has extended the agreement it had with the technology firm until 2022 in its attempt to accelerate the digitization process in which the company is immersed.
It was already in 2017 when this alliance was sealed to integrate tools such as the cloud within the oil company , to store the huge amount of data handled by the company. “Digitization is the lever towards the energy transition , ” explained the company’s CIO, Valero Marín, in a meeting with the media. The company has a return in the form of cash flow of € 1 billion until 2022 and an additional € 300 million until 2020.
The oil company chaired by Antonio Brufau advances in the implementation of data technology, analytical models and artificial intelligence. ” All this allows predictive maintenance and improve the efficiency of operations,” said Marín. “We also explore the use of drones and the blockchain for our operations.”
And a practical example of the use of blockchain is the creation of a certification platform in which Repsol has integrated its collaborating companies so that there is a record of the operations carried out with suppliers and distributors.
So that employees are not negatively impacted by the advancement of digitization in the company, the company has already trained 2,500 employees in artificial intelligence and another 500 in blockchain.
The oil company contemplates its future with connected and intelligent service stations . An idea that he plans to carry out through the installation of Internet of Things technologies.
The digitization processes will also reach their refineries and plants with facilities that remotely emit information to generate predictive models.
But not only that, both companies are working on the creation of digital twins, that is, data models that would allow analysis and reproduction of a scenario. Given that digital twins are a digital copy of a certain machine, it would allow simulations and understanding the consequences of certain changes, generating scenarios and validating hypotheses.
But the oil company also has a Cloud Competence Center in which more than a hundred professionals specialized in cloud technologies work . Repsol expects 70% of the infrastructure to be in cloud environments by 2022, compared to 30% today, for which it aims to reach a total of 4,000 servers in the cloud.