Topsides Separation – Digitalize to manage maturing assets Presented by Tom Ralston of MySep Pte Ltd

Topsides Separation – Digitalize to manage maturing assets

Presenter: Tom Ralston, MySep Pte Ltd

Increasingly, process digital twins are being applied across oil & gas facilities to optimize operations. These digital twins are usually based on commercial process simulation platforms with a detailed representation of the key process operations. In topsides production, our target will be to maximize facility revenue and profit in a sustainable way. Process engineering teams will have to build a digital twin which represents all the important unit operations, and embodies sufficient rigour to capture the fundamental system constraints. Phase separation might be considered the heart of topsides processing – how can that be digitalized?

The presentation will include demonstration of a steady-state production digital twin, showing how it can be used to understand the real operational constraints, and the revenue impact these have on facility operations. Additional material will touch on dynamic digital twins in production and examples from LNG and Downstream sectors.

Tom Ralston Biography.

Tom has a multifaceted career spanning experimental and analytical heat transfer research, software development, and process engineering. With technology leadership roles at the UK National Engineering Laboratory (NEL), Hyprotech and AspenTech, he has been instrumental in shaping heat transfer software businesses and driving digital process engineering growth. His work with AspenTech culminated in the high-level integration of the EDR software suite, with Aspen HYSYS and Aspen Plus process simulators. This made rigorous heat exchanger simulation available to process engineers optimizing operations and process designs. Over the past 8 years with MySep Pte Ltd, his expertise has guided product development, market strategies, and partnerships. He currently leads MySep Pte Ltd’s business development for digital process engineering and has recently published on process Digital Twins in LNG Industry Journal and in Petroleum Technology Quarterly.