OREANDA-NEWS. August 21, 2015. With energy as a driving force for global economic development, energy companies around the world are encountering a multitude of challenges as they move towards digital transformation. Against this backdrop, Huawei hosted its Global Energy Industry Summit 2015 with the theme of “Innovative ICT Enables Smart Energy” in Almaty, Kazakhstan, from August 19 to 20, 2015. The summit gathered over two hundred attendees to discuss the application of innovative ICT technologies and solutions in the energy industry to enhance production efficiency, enable scientific management and ensure secure operations. Attendees included representatives from Huawei’s customers from the energy sector in China, Egypt, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Kazakhstan; global partners such as CNPC Richfit, China Petroleum Pipeline Engineering Corporation (CPPE), Honeywell, ABB, and SAP; senior analysts from the Forrester Research consulting company; as well as experts and media from the global oil and gas industry.

“In the future, ICT technologies will substantially change the entire oil and gas industry, and will redefine business strategies and efficient production methods in the process," said Bobby Cameron, Vice President of Forrester. “Today, the industry’s ecosystem faces many difficulties. Specifically, these challenges include constant pipeline security issues, the inability to perform quick analyses and sharing of real-time data exploration, low operational efficiency, and low production maturity. These are key considerations that negatively impact the profitability of oil and gas companies.”

Zhang Zhilin, Ex-CTO & Vice President, Information Department, Sinopec Group, said the biggest cause of these challenges can be attributed to international oil price fluctuations, adding that, “It is only through constant innovation, cost reduction, and efficiency improvement that oil and gas companies can remain competitive. The informatization of the energy industry will focus on areas including Internet of Things (IoT), big data, cloud computing, mobile and coordination, and intelligence, facilitating the evolution from digital energy to smart energy.”

Phil Millette, a Senior Consultant from Honeywell, highlighted that oil and gas companies need to focus on security and efficiency, and said, “The key of production process optimization is to ensure the safety of employees and to protect the environment while improving collaborative operations. Real-time video surveillance and remote collaboration technologies can be leveraged to ensure safe operations.”

Also at the summit, Jerry Ji, President of the Energy Industry, Huawei Enterprise Business Group, delivered a keynote speech titled “Innovative ICT Empowers Smart Energy”, in which he said, “Innovative ICT will drive growth in the energy industry, and we expect the world to have 100 billion data connections across industries by 2025. The oil and gas industry will witness the ever-increasing application of smart devices, which generate large volumes of data. This data will need to be analyzed and stored. As such, traditional OT devices will gradually develop new IT features to keep pace with industry trends. Huawei, in efforts to address this emerging trend, launched its innovative ‘cloud-pipe-device’ architecture to apply innovative ICT technologies and solutions. This includes cloud data center and big data, agile networks and LTE, Internet of Things (IoT) gateway and open-source IoT operating system ‘LiteOS’. These technologies can be applied to the entire oil and gas production process to drive the transformation of the oil and gas industry.”

“In our world today, eighty-five percent of crude oil and seventy percent of natural gas are transported by pipelines that stretch thousands of miles around the world. As a result, it is important for oil and gas companies to ensure safe, reliable and efficient operations across these long-distance pipelines. At the summit, Huawei is joined by CNPC Richfit, CPPE, ABB, and Honeywell, to launch an end-to-end digital pipeline solution to provide integrated services covering consultation and design, ICT infrastructure, production automation, applications, and services,” Jerry Ji added.

At the summit, Huawei also showcased a series of smart energy solutions, including digital pipeline, digital production, cloud data center, and mobile office. These solutions cover all the operations processes in the oil and gas industry, from discovery to production, transportation, and information management. As part of the discussions around the development of digital pipelines and related trends, attendees at the summit also had the opportunity to visit the Huawei and Asia Gas Pipeline (AGP) Almaty Control Center (ACC) prototype located in the central Almaty, an overall control center for the AGP-AB line and the future AGP-C line. The center is capable of monitoring natural gas pipelines across Kazakhstan. During the visit, Huawei showcased the center’s site-based Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system, satellite images of pipelines and video images of the sites.

“Central Asia is the world’s third largest oilfield and plays an important role in the global oil and gas industry. Since we established our business in Central Asia in 1997, Huawei has been committed to providing competitive end-to-end ICT solutions and services to telecom carriers, enterprises, and consumers by bringing cutting-edge communications technologies and products into the region,” said Mike Han, President of Huawei’s Central Asia & Caucasia Enterprise Business.

In Central Asia, Huawei has provided products and services to a number of oil and gas companies, including Kazakhstan AGP, Kazakhstan’s Beineu Bozoi Shymkent Gas Pipeline (BSGP), PetroKazakhstan, KazMunaiGas (KMG), Uzbekistan Asia Trans Gas, Turkmenistan Amu Darya, CIK, and Sinopec Kazakhstan. Huawei’s Digital Pipeline Solution has been applied to a total of 4,623 kilometers of gas pipelines in Central Asia, including the Kazakhstan-China natural gas pipeline AB line (AGP AB line), which is the world’s first and longest digital natural gas pipelines. In the future, Huawei will continue to leverage its ICT expertise to help customers in Central Asia improve efficiency, reduce energy consumption, enhance operational safety and eventually enable digital transformation.

To date, Huawei has successfully provided products and solutions to twelve of the top twenty global energy companies. In Norway, Huawei established the first oil LTE network for offshore oilfield exploration, which increased production efficiency by thirty percent while lowering costs by twenty percent. In China, Huawei worked with CNPC BGP to establish China’s largest professional data management center with 300 Mbit/s processing throughput and Terabyte-level data storage capacity. In the Middle East, Huawei assisted Saudi Aramco, the largest oil company in the world, in the upgrade of its communications system by converging digital and analogue technology and by converging mobile and fixed networks to significantly improve operational efficiency.