To put the importance of the Pluto plant into perspective, it is responsible for about 50% of Woodside's revenue.

 

Woodside senior vice-president and chief technology officer Shaun Gregory had long been an advocate for predictive analytics and believed that was the way forward for the company.

 

He picked the piece of Pluto equipment as a means of demonstrating the benefits of big data and predictive analytics.

 

Gregory told a recent Amazon Web Services summit in Perth that the piece of equipment would have catastrophic failures.

 

This piece of equipment had 10,000 sensors on it and Gregory and his team were able to use the data from those sensors to get an understanding of what was happening with it.

 

"We were able to predict its next failure four days out," he said.

 

"That got the CEO and chief operating officer types to say we should do more."

 

From there Gregory was able to expand his big data efforts to the rest of the Pluto plant, which has about 250,000 sensors.

 

"This led to lots of problems but that's good," Gregory said.

 

"Those are opportunities for innovation."

 

To give an idea of the waterfall of data pouring out of that plant, Gregory said it generated 2000 new records every second.

 

"Production constraints are recalculated once every 10 minutes," he said.

 

"The system has remembered every production decision since 2012. It compares those to what is going on now. It compares the best ever to how production is going today. It presents operational options to the operator to make better production decisions.

 

"It's essentially free revenue. We're getting maximum possible production.

 

"That has transformed our staff. We're getting a flood of ideas as we roll this out across the business."

 

Gregory's approach to big data has also transformed.

 

"When we started I split data analytics and artificial intelligence into different areas," he said.

 

"Now they are together. That's been transformational."

 

Gregory said the innovation cycle in the oil and gas industry usually spanned about 10 years.

 

He believes with the sort of approach Woodside has been taking to its data that innovation horizon could be brought down to 10 months to 10 weeks to possibly even less.

 

"I can't wait until it gets to 10 minutes," Gregory said.

 

The exciting thing from Woodside's point of view is that it is only two years into this journey.