informatics in petrochemicals


them to the laboratory, plants can decrease the wear on machines and also the oil costs. Ultimately, companies avoid disruption in production, which improves cost- effectiveness.’ Bytewize has been supplying informatics


soſtware to the petrochemicals industry, predominantly in the Nordic countries, since 1999. Its first such customer, VP Diagnose, could not find a system that fitted its needs as they had to save a lot of information about the source of the sample (in their case, the transformer from where they take the oil sample). Tis led to customising O3Lims for the specific needs of a petrochemical laboratory. Direct input from instruments and tight


integration with existing company soſtware are common themes here too: ‘When we get a new customer it is very likely that it already has other soſtware installed, something that increases the demand of developing a flexible LIMS that is easy to integrate. Connecting LIMS to the instrument soſtware can save a lot of time as you decrease the need for manual handling; results and other data can get imported automatically.’ Wahlund said that even replacing an


older system puts pressure on the flexibility of the LIMS: ‘Many laboratories want to import historical data into the new system and instead of typing in data manually from maybe 10 years back, we write a script and transfer it automatically.’


Te same themes – integration with pre-


existing soſtware, immediate access to data, and the efficiencies that come from using a LIMS – are evident at Ras Laffan Industrial City in Qatar. Here, the world’s largest gas to liquids facility, Pearl GTL, was established by Shell and Qatar Petroleum in 2006. It currently processes 1.6 billion cubic feet of wellhead gas each day, using Shell’s Middle Distillate Synthesis process to convert the gas


DATA MANAGEMENT WAS A MAJOR PRIORITY. WE NEEDED


CONDENSED, ACCURATE INFORMATION AT OUR FINGERTIPS


into fuels, lubricants and other products. According to Ajith Kumar, senior business


analyst for Qatar Shell GTL: ‘With billions of investor dollars and tens of thousands of jobs at stake, data management was a major priority. We needed condensed, accurate information at our fingertips at all times.’ For its testing laboratories, Shell opted for a Termo Scientific SampleManager LIMS. At Pearl GTL, this LIMS is integrated with an operations management system (known as OTTER), process historian (PI), the oil movement and batch tracking system, laboratory instruments and other production


Lessons from life sciences?


It is not only in process quality control but also in research and technology development that petrochemical companies have a need for informatics software to manage the huge amounts of data that they generate and produce knowledge that is useful for scientific and business decisions. And these other applications also face similar problems of accommodating data generated by legacy systems, of crossing geographical and linguistic boundaries, and of integrating with existing software.


For Shikha O’Brien, VP business development USA for Dotmatics, the aim is a fully integrated system that can be accessed piecemeal in order to enable scientists to collaborate. ‘Irrespective of how users have captured their data, scientists should have access to it in a format that makes sense to them,’ she said.


Both she and Glyn Williams, VP of product delivery at IDBS, see parallels with the pharmaceutical and life sciences industries, more so perhaps than is evident in the quality-control area. ‘Today, collaboration is a necessity, not a


8 SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING WORLD


luxury in the life sciences,’ O’Brien said. ‘People access and make decisions on data across multiple departments, and we see the same model now being applied to petrochemicals.’ Williams added: ‘We do see a lot of commonality. There may be different emphases, but research is research.’ Users do not need a complicated system, O’Brien continued. Dotmatics offers an off-the-shelf web-based ‘dashboard’ that is data-agnostic. It connects with disparate data sources, retrieves and presents the information in a format that the end-user wants. The petrochemicals industry is a challenge, she went on, because it has a lot of data, often held on legacy or in-house systems from as far back as the 1980s and it is only recently, in her view, that the industry has started looking at the life sciences model to see how it can bring in a proper informatics solution to capture and retrieve data. For Glyn Williams, one very big growth area,


where he sees parallels with the life sciences, is in biofuels. There is a similarity to early-stage pharma, he said, where the companies need to protect their intellectual property (IP). In the case of biofuels, the


IP may be the process rather than the product itself but the challenge to the informatics system is the same – ensuring that everything is documented and recorded in a way that will stand up in patent litigation, if need be. IP protection is one of the major things that electronic lab notebooks do, he said, which is why the biofuels companies are interested in such solutions. The structure of the biofuels industry mirrors that of biotechnology, with lots of small companies carrying out early stage work and hoping to sell on to the big oil majors (or, indeed, sell the entire company and its intellectual property portfolio). Their need is to have ‘systems that are flexible and track the decision making processes -- what they have done and the results, to see if they are successful -- and then move on to the stage of “can you scale it up?”.’


Although the emphasis is often on novel


procedures, he sees the whole enterprise as very similar to pharmaceuticals, where once a compound is developed the challenge is to scale that up efficiently and cost effectively.


@scwmagazine l www.scientific-computing.com


systems. Instead of sending test results manually to operations, technologists and process engineers, at Pearl GTL results become available to all relevant parties within the PI system as soon as they are authorised in SampleManager. Colin Turston, director of product


strategy, process industries, at Termo Fisher Scientific, cites an example of the benefits of this integration: when panel operators need to move oil to new tanks in preparation for shipping, they do not have to wait to be notified of test results, minimising demurrage charges for loading delays that can cost as much as $35,000 per day. ‘Since Pearl GTL opened, the facility has incurred no demurrage charges, an outstanding feat for an operation so large,’ he said. But there are benefits from integration


in the other direction – with the instrumentation, Turston continued. Sample points in the field are marked with radio frequency identification tags so that when field staff perform sample rounds: ‘A handheld computer guides them to each sample point and then automatically records the required information. Te data are then instantly transferred to SampleManager from the field, saving Pearl GTL an estimated 2,400 man-hours a year.’ Mansoor Al-Shamri, laboratory manager for Qatar Shell GTL, stressed the benefits: ‘Field operators can do their jobs faster and also more accurately, since they’re not recording readings by hand.’


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