Norway-based Equinor ASA, formerly Statoil, will be digitizing and maintaining its plants with Aucotec's data-driven, cooperative platform Engineering Base (EB), the company said on Sept. 17.

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 said it is undergoing a transformation process whereby the traditional document-oriented lifecycle information on the plants is becoming highly digital, centrally managed data.

“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,” Uwe Vogt, Aucotec’s executive officer, said. 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,” Vogt said. “Not only EB, but also the whole Aucotec team won them over.”