The engineering software developer Aucotec acquired a new major client in the oil, gas, wind and solar energy sectors: Equinor ASA, formerly Statoil, based in Stavanger, Norway, will be digitizing and maintaining its plants with Aucotec's data-driven, cooperative platform Engineering Base (EB) from now on.

Backbone of plant data

Equinor is one of the world's largest offshore operators, and also maintains refineries and wind farms. The company is undergoing a transformation process whereby the traditional document-oriented lifecycle information on the plants is becoming highly digital, centrally managed data. It is much easier to keep up-to-date, and maintenance is greatly facilitated.

"We're very proud that Engineering Base provides the backbone for the data relating to Equinor's plants and their maintenance. It was probably not entirely by chance that they named the EB project 'Spine'," said Uwe Vogt, Executive Officer at Aucotec. "We presented the new range of our platform for the first time at the last ACHEMA. The fact that Equinor is also one of the major new clients that we were able to impress with this is an outstanding endorsement of our team," stressed Vogt. The system covers all core disciplines of process engineering from FEED via basic and detailed engineering, DCS configuration and cause & effect support to maintenance.

Digital twin from over 350,000 documents

Equinor is starting to work with EB on the new Johan Sverdrup oil rig project, which will begin oil production at the end of 2019. It will exploit a huge oil field approximately 160 km from Stavanger, whose capacity is expected to last around 50 years. The plant, consisting of several platforms, will also have to work as efficiently as possible for a correspondingly long period of time and will always have to have up-to-date documentation.

"Equinor expects a significant simplification and thus an acceleration of maintenance work. Changes and collaboration with many subcontractors, whether in the design area or in operation, are much easier to implement and are more consistent with this unique master engineering database," explained the Aucotec Executive Officer. For this purpose, more than 350,000 Johan Sverdrup documents are being migrated to EB and digitally processed there.

Since all disciplines are covered by EB's object-oriented plant model, changes have only to be centrally entered once. Each representation of the modified object is automatically updated. "This is how EB contains the complete digital twin with all its logic, and not just a sub-discipline," said Vogt. "Not only EB, but also the whole Aucotec team won them over," he added.