Optimization and Systems Theory Seminar
Friday September 3 at 11.00 Lindstedtsvägen 25, room 3721


David Anisi and Markus Högberg  ABB, Forkningssenter for Olje, Gass og Petrokjemi, Norway.

Strategic R&D for the oil and gas industry

Although alternative energy sources are expanding, due to the growing energy consumption world-wide, the need for oil and gas remains high for the foreseeable future. As a general trend, most of the easy accessible oil and gas fields have already been exploited, leaving the more remote and geo-politically challenging reserves for future exploration. To cope with this, the oil and gas industries are continuously looking towards novel technical solutions, working practices and business models. The main drivers are to improve health, safety and environment (HSE), as well as production and cost efficiency. As a global provider of power and automation systems as well as one of the leading robot manufacturers in the world, ABB has recognized the need for higher degree of automation as a way to reduce HSE risks. Combining this with the know-how and over 50 years of experience from oil and gas, puts ABB in a unique collaborator position for the industry. This seminar gives an overview of the current research topics and activities at our R&D department in Oslo, Norway. The main focus will be on two projects which involve a large number of problems suitably addressed by tools from applied mathematics, in particular, optimization and control. The first project concerns our robotic activities which aim at exploring, developing and demonstrating next generation unmanned oil and gas facilities. These activities encompass indoor lab experiments, as well as outdoor demonstrations onsite. Next, activities in the Enhanced Asset Performance project will be considered. The main goal here is to develop, pilot and verify monitoring and diagnostics tools for asset condition and performance. Rigorous condition monitoring and predictive maintenance is expected to be a major cost saver in the industry. We expect that the seminar will incite exchange of ideas, and hopefully entice younger graduate students to take up some of the recognized grand challenges faced within the oil and gas industry.


Calendar of seminars Last update: August 31, 2010.