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Shell Oil has created a next generation control room (CR) to monitor their deep water offshore production activities in the Americas. Shell Oil has created a control room whose scope of analysis is larger than the typical control room, and one that is also delivering an ROI much greater than is typical. The Shell CR is also an Internet of Things (IIoT) Big Data analytics solution. From a supply chain perspective, this is a critical cog in their supply chain continuity capabilities. From an operations perspective, this solution delivers ROI in the form of better throughput. Tom Moroney, Shell Oil’s VP of Wells and Facilities Technologies, spoke at ARC’s 2016 Industry Forum in Orlando in February. This article is based upon his remarks. A control room (CR), or operations center, is a room serving as a central space where a large production facility or physically dispersed production environment can be monitored and controlled by operational personnel. Control rooms are very common in the heavy process industries. The CR’s goals are to insure the safe operation of a facility and production control. The data is real-time and near real-time, and typically actions that are taken based on the information are presented to operators is almost instantaneous in the event of safety issues, or can be executed in a few hours surrounding less critical production equipment issues. Shell’s CR, located in New Orleans, is staffed by both operational personnel and engineers, with both short term decision making by operations personnel and engineering decisions and analysis that occurs over days and weeks. The savings from this next generation control room have been on the order of 5 to 10 times larger then what they invested. These savings have occurred based on a higher degree of production optimization, based on more tightly integrating […]