Digital twins for A to B

Earlier this year, Kongsberg Digital (KDI), BW LNG, and Alpha Ori Technologies signed a strategic digitalisation partnership to develop digital capabilities to enhance efficiency and reduce the environmental footprint of LNG carriers and floating storage and regasification units (FRSUs). The agreement encompasses several projects and includes utilising a common data management platform and developing maritime digital twins and digital processing models to facilitate operational excellence.

BW LNG has been a partner with KDI for some time and the company’s ships, including LNG carriers, already contain an extensive array of Kongsberg equipment on board. This equipment manages and monitors the cooling, storage, and boil-off from the tanks. KDI also has systems for fiscal metering the gas – the custody transfer system (CTS), which is developed and sold by Kongsberg Maritime. The partnership with BW LNG is focused on how digitalisation and specifically digital twins can enable new ways of working in the LNG industry.

KDI aims to develop solutions that bring data from various sources together and combine it into an overarching decision support system. This enables the optimisation of energy consumption of LNG carriers, and the gas production and export process on FSRUs. It is a large and complex value chain, and the challenge is to collect data from assets, contextualise it, and deliver critical insights in a decisionsupport context, enabling intelligent decisions around planning and maintenance.

An evolving sector

The LNG industry is, relatively speaking, still an evolving sector. It remains a capital-intensive industry, and infrastructure build-out requires highly specialised equipment. Traditionally, upfront investments in such infrastructure have been supported by long-term contracts based on fixed-point delivery from point A to point B. Counterparties were known and deals were made on a long-term basis. More recently, with the development of a more diverse market, that trend has started to edge in the direction of greater flexibility with rapid expansions and new markets emerging online. This has resulted in the need for more flexible arrangements between the parties and a requirement to manage optionality in terms of getting the most out of LNG, both commercially and operationally.

The major trade routes for LNG are still intact, but China has emerged as a significant consumer recently overtaking Japan as the largest global LNG importer. On the supply side, there are the traditional locations such as Qatar in the Middle East, but recently the US has grown substantially.

Managing operations in an unstable and evolving market

It is the evolving nature of the market that has encouraged prominent industry players to take more expansive end-to-end positions. For such a strategy to be successful companies require better insight, not just long-term and mid-term horizon planning, but real-time management and decision support.

That is what KDI helps enable through digital twins. Through ecosystems of digital twins, the company can elevate operational data related to how a commodity is produced, stored, loaded, and transported on its way from point A to point B, touching upon every aspect of the value chain including the fuel consumption involved and the performance of the export and import terminals. This insight provides LNG operators taking these end-to-end positions with an integrated view of their LNG volumes and value chain, a discipline historically restricted to energy trading risk management (ETRM) systems, or in some cases custom bolt-on solutions. Digital twins deliver the necessary operational perspective that allows people to make more rapid near-term decisions.

A digital twin of an asset in the value chain, such as an LNG carrier or import terminal, could inform the operator about the current inventory position. It can also provide an insight into the quality and the predicted quality of the LNG,

Haavard Oestensen and Andreas Jagtøyen, Kongsberg Digital, Norway, explain how the complexities of a volatile LNG market can be navigated with digital twins.

which is where the digital twin comes to the fore. With an integrated view that encapsulates real-time ageing calculations and support for digital custody transfers, it allows the operator to make informed decisions based on granular and high-fidelity data. In the shorter time horizon, it can advise a carrier to divert cargo to a different port or decide to carry out a ship-to-ship transfer based on intelligence on how that will impact the volume.

Creating a network of twins

Achieving this requires not just a digital twin of the asset being managed but an ecosystem of digital twins representing that infrastructure from point A to point B, across a portfolio with operational optionality built in. The first step on this process is to make all the current information available. On top of this all the operational data points need to be layered in, including quality, location, commercial information, and technical supporting information regarding the facilities.

The maturation of digital twin technology has allowed KDI to embed more than one twin at a time. With this ecosystem, data between digital twins can be shared and this can be leveraged across the entire portfolio to enable assessment of the impact – not only on the asset being directly managed but any indirect impact across the entire system.

What KDI is delivering through this system of digital twins is the connection between OT and IoT on ownership. It fetches contextualised data from the different systems onboard the ship. It brings the data into a harmonised cloud platform, which is then available for various applications through an API. This is undertaken to fetch data from different sources onboard the ship, contextualise it, and put it into an asset model and harmonised model to compare data from one vessel to another. This data is then made available for different applications, like a digital twin or a performance optimisation tool.

For the shipping industry, a digital twin is considered as more of an application, while as for the production plant or the oil and gas industry, it is more of a platform. It has greater granularity, and compared to oil and gas, they have a different purpose. But they have the same result in that data can be bridged from one part of the value chain such as maritime, into other parts of the value chain such as gas trading. Bringing data from a different application and making it available for the larger value chain and new stakeholders in the industry is what the company is working on.

Figure 1. Digital technologies are forecast to save operators between US$100 billion and US$1 trillion by 2025.

Figure 2. Kongsberg’s digital twin is a full facility virtualisation that leverages collected information to describe the current situation and predict how the asset will behave in its environment over time.

The digital difference

The transportation of LNG is more complex than other typical cargo trades. This is in part because the gas onboard in the cargo tanks is also consumed as fuel for the vessel. When delivering a cargo at an import terminal, storage volume has decreased, the LNG may have a different composition, and there is less energy onboard for completion of the transaction. When using energy from the tanks for propulsion, it is essential to understand how much, to stay within specifications. Additionally, weather conditions can affect the rate of boil-off, and the amount of fuel used from the tanks will depend on the routing.

What has made a real difference is the ability to layer operational information into a management portfolio. Operators finally find themselves with an avenue to tie in all that operational end-to-end data that is unique for LNG. The attempts that have been made up until this point have mostly centred on trying to get a better idea of quality, deliverability, and contractual options. KDI is now bringing operational reality into a particular value chain with high-cost infrastructure and a very low tolerance for errors along that value chain. If where the LNG is to be delivered has been miscalculated, the vessel can be diverted, but LNG will be consumed on the way to the next terminal. There will be a limited set of terminals that can take the LNG quality without degrading LNG that is already in the system on the other side. That is what is on the more visionary ends; KDI has the ambition to deliver into the market.

Conclusion

In sum, with KDI’s digital twin technologies, the company is delivering the decision support to make intelligent choices based on improvements in both descriptive and predictive insights. Better insight and, in turn, decision support leads to efficiency in operations and shipping, putting those operators at an advantage compared to others; ultimately serving their markets with better quality. At the end of the day, it is all about meaningfully elevating operational data from across the LNG value chain to enable improved decision making.