Ondiflo, a blockchain platform for the oil and gas industry, has completed – in collaboration with BPX Energy together with a selection of its suppliers- a successful Proof of Value (PoV) project related to fluid hauling in East Texas. BPX Energy is the US onshore oil and gas unit of global energy company BP. It (BPX Energy) has significant activities producing natural gas, NGLs and condensate across six states, including production from unconventional gas, coalbed methane (CBM) and shale gas assets.
Balaji Ramakrishnan, BPX Energy’s Director of Procurement and Supply Chain, added: “Ondiflo’s technology drastically transforms how an oilfield transaction is managed from a paper-based process into the digital age, increasing productivity, reducing costs and creating value.”
The Ondiflo pilot with BPX Energy
The pilot deployed Ondiflo’s blockchain-based solution with three water hauling companies (C&J, Common and Select Energy Services). By using the blockchain solution, BPX Energy and its suppliers were able to identify substantial operational and financial benefits, including:
- cost reductions through improved efficiency
- reduced procure-to-pay time cycles
- improved asset utilisation.
50 metered wells connected to the Ondiflo platform, each sent tank levels every 5 minutes. This resulted in the processing for 10,500 hauls from the start of the project. During this time an average of >90% accuracy was achieved in haul detection and matching to field tickets. Over 65 truck drivers and 11 dispatchers used the Ondiflo app and one company used its own e-ticketing app connected to the Ondiflo APIs for this project.
The PoV project improved dispatch optimisation by projecting service requests out for 48 hours. Savings on the field ticket approval effort and invoice processing efforts occurred through automatic approving of hauls if the volume computed by Ondiflo matched the volume entered on the field ticket.
Jean-Pierre Foehn, CEO of Ondiflo, said, “Our methodology clearly established the impact of the combined IoT, Mobile and Blockchain technologies on the current process and the outcome for the business case. We are confident that when moving to production with the integration of the various back-office systems involved in the Procure-to-Pay, the impact of automation will be fully realized and will lead the industry to quick adoption.”
The Ondiflo platform
The Ondiflo blockchain solution for water hauling leverages:
- Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) sensors
- IIoT clouds
- private blockchain networks.
The objective of the blockchain application is to streamline the entire water hauling process where:
- the application for fluid hauling provides an automation platform for the optimisation of field tracking activities
- tank-level data received from sensors plus service orders, field tickets, invoices and regulatory documentation transact via smart contracts
- key-data is captured onto the blockchain.
Enterprise Times: what does this mean
Water hauling may seem a low key, and not altogether relevant, activity for an energy producing company. Yet, in the US there:
- 1M onshore wells.
- 20M+ barrels of produced water
- 100M+ truck rotations per year between oilfields and water treatment centers
- 100+ million field tickets produced.
This Proof of Value of blockchain demonstrates that the convergence of IIoT, blockchain and data science can combine for legally enforceable automation of the procure-to-pay (P2P) process in fluid hauling during the production phase of an oil/gas well. The conclusion, as described by Ondiflo, is that its solution presents a solid business case.
