Digital gas scheduling smartsheet

Our trading and shipping business uses a digital gas scheduling smartsheet (GSS) to coordinate the flow of natural gas. Launched in 2019 and recently fully live, our GSS technology successfully integrates gas operations data into a seamless information exchange, providing a versatile and stable platform.

For our gas operations team, the GSS platform is a game-changer, offering a flexible yet standardized tool that streamlines the once-fragmented process of nominating and transporting natural gas through hundreds of pipelines from producers to end users in the Americas.

Among other benefits, GSS allows us to maintain a real-time position without sacrificing functionality; it reduces the risks associated with manual data entry; it delivers cost savings by replacing an outmoded accounting system; and it provides a strong foundation for further automation.

bp fully moved our entire Americas trading estate to the digital cloud in 2020. This made a big difference for our Houston-based gas and power trading business in February 2021, when Winter Storm Uri caused extreme and unprecedented freezing temperatures across the US, leading to significant disruptions to supply and demand within US natural gas and power markets. This caused extended power outages within the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which serves Houston. Because we moved our US trading applications to a highly resilient cloud datacenter in Ohio, all bp electronic systems were fully operational and the business was able to perform and deliver business critical activities with minimal disturbance to its customers and the markets.

Leader in digital innovation

Relying on a mix of engineers who maintain the computers and software developers who work with our businesses — the CHPC supports digital innovation across bp, especially in the areas of seismic technology, reservoir engineering, applied sciences and molecular biology.

The CHPC has enough computing power to perform 21 quadrillion operations per second. For perspective, the CHPC has the storage capacity of 90,000 512-gigabyte iPhones, meaning it can hold more than 3,000 times the amount of information in the US Library of Congress.

Since the early 2000s, bp geophysicists have used CHPC resources to design and optimize a range of seismic acquisition methods. Their work has made it much easier to get high-quality seismic data, helping us deliver faster and safer operations in the Gulf of Mexico.

Mapping the Earth’s subsurface

Utilizing CHPC resources, our seismic imaging group developed a technology known as “deblending” to help process some of the more complex datasets we had acquired. We then shared this technology with bp vendors to enable its large-scale application across our portfolio.

In 2006 bp also invented and patented a computational technique for applying full waveform inversion (FWI) to industry-scale seismic datasets. While FWI had been used in academic research, it had never been used at scale due to the enormous computational demands. Our invention emerged from our seismic modeling expertise, underpinned by the CHPC.