Bentley Systems Inc., the leading global provider of comprehensive software and digital twin cloud services for advancing the design, construction, and operations of infrastructure, said Oct. 16 that Shell’s Deepwater business has selected Bentley’s digital twin approach to streamline its capital projects process and accelerate time to first oil.

With a plan to deliver several subsea tie-back projects over the next 10 years, Shell Deepwater Projects has recognized a significant opportunity to accelerate capital project delivery and cut project delivery time by implementing an integrated digital project & engineering environment. The solution spans project conception in the early phase design through to handover.

“Shell Deepwater Projects is developing an integrated Workflow and Data Platform from system selection to asset handover to streamline our capital projects processes and accelerate time to first oil,” said General Manager Gulf of Mexico Deepwater Projects GT Ju. “The platform is being developed in partnership with Bentley leveraging Bentley’s iTwin open, scalable Azure cloud-based platform which provides interoperability across owner and supply chain systems. We believe that an end-to-end platform that gives us visibility and transparency to Project and Engineering data across our portfolio will be a key driver to delivering competitive projects.”

In addition, Bentley revealed that it is providing investment funds to FutureOn, a Norwegian software company supporting deepwater subsea projects, to accelerate going digital within the oil and gas industry. The investment sets the stage for FutureOn and Bentley to deliver the next-generation digital twin technology required for oil and gas ecosystems to manage and analyze data, integrate with existing systems, provide analytics visibility, and rapidly explore ideas collaboratively.

FutureOn builds on more than 20 years of visual engineering experience specifically in the oil and gas subsea domain. The company will combine its award-winning field design application (FieldAP) and its API-centric collaboration platform (FieldTwin) with Bentley’s digital twin platform (iTwin) to advance user organizations like Shell Deepwater. Both FutureOn and Bentley platforms use open web standards to facilitate complex integration and customization, and the combined offerings are already being implemented in exploration and production workflows for the creation and curation of subsea digital twins.

“The Bentley Acceleration Fund investment is a significant milestone for FutureOn and will help drive the growth of our business by advancing the FutureOn technology as well as extending our reach,” Paal Roppen, FutureOn CEO, said. “Today, digitalization is more important than ever for the oil and gas industry as challenging market conditions persist. Innovative and disruptive digital twin technologies such as those we develop alongside Bentley will help farsighted organizations like Shell Deepwater to improve project and asset performance.”

Offshore