Refiners Set to Increase Spending on Digital Technologies: Accenture Research

Nearly two-thirds of refiners plan to increase their investments in digital technologies over the next three to five years, although digital is not one of the top plant investment areas for refiners today, according to new research from Accenture.

The Accenture Connected Refinery research  based on a survey of more than 200 executives, functional leaders and engineers at refiners globally shows that more than half of respondents (57%) said that their current level of digital investment overall was more or significantly more than 12 months ago.

“Oil & gas refiners in India have been facing significant turbulence in recent times due to increased crude price volatility, increased competitive intensity, de-regulation in market pricing and enhanced focus of global majors on India. Resultantly, they are relentless in cutting costs and improving predictability of plant operations”, said Sandeep Dutta, Managing Director and Lead, Resources, Accenture in India.

While this spending is set to increase, only 19% of refiners rated digital as one of their top three priorities for spending on plant efficiency and productivity over the next three years.

“Indian refiners have commenced their transformative journey into the 'new' and are embracing digital technologies. The common use cases across players include corrosion management, predictive asset maintenance, visual inspection leveraging drones, and video analytics for safety”, said, Hari Shankaranarayanan, Managing Director, Resources, Accenture in India

When asked to identify the most important benefits that digital technologies will provide, respondents most often cited more-effective plant management (63% of respondents), reducing operational risk (59%) and more-efficient and predictive maintenance (54%).

Reducing operational costs appeared most frequently in the top three business priorities that will drive refiners’ next digital investments, cited by 39% of respondents, yet the most frequently mentioned barrier to digital implementation was the investment required, cited by 50% of respondents.

Tracey Countryman, managing director, Asset and Operations Services, Accenture, said, “Now that computing power is cheaper than ever and mobile and Internet of Things solutions are more viable, refiners must move beyond simply piloting new digital technologies and into deployment at scale to see the benefits of digital. They will then recognize the significant reduction in operating costs and the potential for fundamental business transformation that these technologies can enable.”

 Increase in digital investments prompts data security concerns

When asked to identify the digital technologies that drive the greatest impact in operational performance, respondents most often cited analytics (74%), cyber security (41%) and mobility (38%). The inclusion of cyber security among the top three suggests that companies are seeking to offset the greater risk of cyber attack that comes with more-connected refinery operations. Some of the current and future planned business investment areas that increase this connectivity include more automation, moving operations to the cloud, mobile solutions, AI and robotics.

“As the number of connected systems and devices that share data in the energy value chain continues to grow, so does the scale and impact of any potential cyberattack risk,” Countryman said.

Showing the need for new measures, more than one-third (36 percent) of respondents cited data security as a barrier to adoption of digital technologies; this figure rose to 50 percent among IT professionals surveyed.

Methodology

The online survey was conducted in March 2017 by PennEnergy Research in partnership with the Oil and Gas Journal. The survey was developed with HSB Solomon Associates LLC, a benchmarking and global advisory services company for the global energy industry. Respondents are subscribers to PennWell publications and comprised more than 200 refining industry professionals, including executive and mid-level management, business unit heads, engineers and project managers from a cross-segment of the industry. The countries represented were Australia, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Canada, China, Curacao, Dominican Republic, Finland, Ghana, Greece, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Malaysia, Norway, Qatar, Singapore, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Trinidad and Tobago, Turkey, the U.K., the U.S. and Venezuela.