By Nicole Linnéa Monavari
Through this award, students are invited to showcase their sustainable ideas to experts in Equinor. The winner gets away with a monetary prize and access to Subject Matter Experts in Equinor for 3 months.
Transforming the drilling industry
The efficiency and safety of drilling and well operations essentially rely on correct, timely, and optimal decisions and actions taken by the driller. Digitalization advances – new sensors, wired pipe data, digital twins, and automation systems – bring about a steadily increasing stream of data helpful for this decision-making. However, the value of these advances is essentially limited by how much information the driller can perceive in real-time through the main communication channel: the screens. The screen space is limited, and increasing the number of screens or tabs does not solve the main bottleneck: how much visual information the driller can perceive and process during long, and often tiring and stressful shifts.
DrillFeel addresses this bottleneck. It is a new technology that allows the driller to feel the drilling process through actuated joysticks – borrowed from the gaming industry. Imagine pressing a button and feeling the drilling process through the joysticks in the driller’s chair as if you put your hands on the BHA several kilometers down the wellbore. You do not need screens, support personnel, or Artificial Intelligence to recognize, for example, a stick-slip vibration. You can feel it, make necessary changes in WOB and RPM, and then confirm, again through feeling, that the stick-slip is gone. It is simple, intuitive, and yet very efficient. You can feel much more than just a stick-slip. Imagine feeling exactly when you need to stop running in casing, with precision like in a robot-assisted surgery, just kilometers away. Think about interacting with automation systems like the lane-keeping functionality in your car: you are in full control of the process, yet an automatic system gives you hints through the steering wheel to stay within your lane. DrillFeel brings this concept to drilling with joysticks instead of the steering wheel. And DrillFeel can do much more.
A functional DrillFeel prototype has been tested by drillers on synthetic and field data, as well as in real time on high-fidelity simulators and in lab-scale drilling. It got positive feedback and support from the industry (AkerBP, Equinor, etc, see, e.g., the feedback from Equinor CEO Anders Opedal:https://youtu.be/wILXR_pje3Y) and received an innovation award from Equinor’s Innovate for Better contest.
Like last year, the panel got so impressed by the brilliant solutions that they raised the prizes for all three of the winning teams. The first group to receive the prize from Equinor where DrillFeel which is a project team led by the professor Alexey Pavlov, where the project received 100 000 NOK. Drillfeel comes from the Faculty of Geoscience and Petroleum at NTNU, where their innovative solutions aims to help to hold the operator updated and enhance their situational awareness by presenting the use of haptic feedback to translate downhole measurements into intuitive forces on a real-time joystick, where the driller can perceive and respond effectively. With this solution, DrillFeel can contribute to transform the drilling for many sectors, such as oil and gas, CO2 storage, hydrogen storage and geothermal energy.
The project team consists of the students Wietse Maas, Jorn Visser, Ali Hashemi, along with their supervisor Alexey Pavlov. Visser encourages everyone to apply for this project, by stating that winning this award confirms that the idea has an enourmous potential which can contribute to a more sustainable world.
“I feel honored that a company like Equinor appreciates our work and awards it with such a prize. The prize and Equinor’s expertise will be a great contribution to further development and promotion of the DrillFeel project and ideas”
Jorn Visser, intern in DrillFeel.
Last year, Visser and Maas finished their Msc at the Eidhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, where both of them had the opportunity to take an internship at NTNU in Trondheim. The internship led them to be a part of the project team of DrillFeel.
Wietse Maas, intern in Drillfeel.
Cerebioncs: One person show
Although INNOVATE for Better recommended groups toapply, Agnessa Pedersen took the chance and applied with her idea Cerebionics. Pedersen told us that it was the first time she applied for this kind of competition, and we are happy she decided to try. During her years in high school, the thoughts around automization got in her mind and she recalls that she thought about autimatizing drawing. After she begun the Master´s in Robotics and Kybernetics, Pedersen realized that these thoughts could go somewhere and Cerebionics was born. With Cerebionics, humans can be “replaced” by humanoid which can contribute to solve challenges with high risk of human accidents.
The panel was so fond by Pedersen´s ideas, that she received not only the original prize of 50 000 NOK, but 150 000 NOK which can contribute to her “one peron show”, as stated by the senior vice president in Equinor Andreas Jagtøyen.
” ‘INNOVATE for better’ was my first pitch ever, and it’s the first time I’ve entered a pitch competition where I publicly shared my idea. It’s difficult to wrap my head around the fact that I was noticed, and that there’s willingness to invest in this. It’s completely surreal, but I’m so grateful for it because now I can afford to build a whole system.”
Agnessa Pedersen, CEO in Cerebionics.
Her plan now is to develop the entire system, where Pedersen is thinking of building a full-scale humanoid and solving some of the minor problems such as speed, distance, and force. In her pitch, Pedersen acknowledges and mentions several problems for humans that can lead to accidents.
“There are several different challenges people face now, such as searching for objects on the ocean floor and building structures that have previously led to accidents. By using humanoids, it can help make the transition to sustainability a little easier.”
Arctic Protein
The startup which ran off with the biggest prize were the startup Arctic Protein, which won 400 000 NOK. Arctic Protein has their roots from the School of Entrepreneurship, and currently consists of four team members from various study backgrounds. The team works actively towards leaving a low climate footprint, by simply being “insect farmers” where they harness Black Soldier Flies, make protein out of it and sells it to feed producers, which can feed their protein flour to the salmon industry in Norway.
“We didn’t expect to win, and we were very lucky and excited to take the first place. We are currently working on an expansion of the production facility, where we will relocate much of the production. This requires that we want to build a container solution in a simple part of the factory. I believe the 400,000 kr will be a perfect contribution to build this up.
In regards to how the start up wants to take advantage of the expertise from Equinor, Myking states that they still need to learn more about various processing techniques which they believe Equinor will be able to contribute to with great advising.
“It was a bit funny because usually we probably wouldn’t fall under Equinor’s scope. First and foremost, we produce insects and use waste streams that often have a lot of quality in them, and we try to optimize how we use them. We do this by feeding it to the insects and using these insects for protein. Through this, we get some by-products, such as the excrement, which is good fertilizer but can also be a great contributor as biogas. When we have such large amounts of waste here in the country, much of which goes to fuel, these insects can be seen as a kind of biofilter simply to extract high-quality protein sources and start the first part of the processing that is converted into biogas.”
Arctic Protein already has big plans for the autumn. They will move to Tromsø to start a factory, something they are incredibly excited about.
“We got hold of the waste there, where again the opportunities lie in the first place. Some of us will still remain here in Trondheim and operate the factory here while we start the new one, so we have a lot of excitement ahead.”