Digital Twin for the Oil and Gas Industry: Overview, Research Trends, Opportunities, and Challenges

With the emergence of industry 4.0, the oil and gas (O&G) industry is now considering a range of digital technologies to enhance productivity, efficiency, and safety of their operations while minimizing capital and operating costs, health and environment risks, and variability in the O&G project life cycles. The deployment of emerging technologies allows O&G companies to construct digital twins (DT) of their assets. Considering DT adoption, the O&G industry is still at an early stage with implementations limited to isolated and selective applications instead of industry-wide implementation, limiting the benefits from DT implementation. To gain the full potential of DT and related technological adoption, a comprehensive understanding of DT technology, the current status of O&G-related DT research activities, and the opportunities and challenges associated with the deployment of DT in the O&G industry are of paramount importance. In order to develop this understanding, this paper presents a literature review of DT within the context of the O&G industry. The paper follows a systematic approach to select articles for the literature review. First, a keywords-based publication search was performed on the scientific databases such as Elsevier, IEEE Xplore, OnePetro, Scopus, and Springer. The filtered articles were then analyzed using online text analytic software (Voyant Tools) followed by a manual review of the abstract, introduction and conclusion sections to select the most relevant articles for our study. These articles and the industrial publications cited by them were thoroughly reviewed to present a comprehensive overview of DT technology and to identify current research status, opportunities and challenges of DT deployment in the O&G industry. From this literature review, it was found that asset integrity monitoring, project planning, and life cycle management are the key application areas of digital twin in the O&G industry while cyber security, lack of standardization, and uncertainty in scope and focus are the key challenges of DT deployment in the O&G industry. When considering the geographical distribution for the DT related research in the O&G industry, the United States (US) is the leading country, followed by Norway, United Kingdom (UK), Canada, China, Italy, Netherland, Brazil, Germany, and Saudi Arabia. The overall publication rate was less than ten articles (approximately) per year until 2017, and a significant increase occurred in 2018 and 2019. The number of journal publications was noticeably lower than the number of conference publications, and the majority of the publications presented theoretical concepts rather than the industrial implementations. Both these observations suggest that the DT implementation in the O&G industry is still at an early stage.

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