Equinor develops a visualization platform utilizing Dash

Introduction

Equinor supplies the energy needs of over 170 million people each day, including 1.6 terawatt-hours of renewable energy production. To succeed as one of the world’s largest offshore operators, Equinor is constantly evaluating and updating the data models behind its subsurface reservoir operations, offshore wind farms, and carbon capture and storage projects.

One of the tools behind these data operations is Equinor’s innovative platform, Webviz, which bypasses the knowledge barriers of specialty software and the technical limitations of traditional business analytics platforms to operationalize data science across the company’s business segments.

Challenge

Accurate subsurface modeling can have a big impact on production, and can also play a significant role in preventing harm to people and the environment. With operations in over 30 countries worldwide, Equinor must ensure a smooth workflow for keeping these models as accurate as possible when new subsurface information has been acquired. Each execution of the update workflow creates an ensemble of 100 to 500 models (up to several terabytes of simulated data) to account for subsurface uncertainty. This output must then be analyzed and presented to management and relevant partners — a lengthy and error-prone process requiring engineers to collate screenshots from a variety of industry software platforms into a single, static presentation. The work was demotivating and formed a bottleneck for efficient business decisions.

Results

The Webviz platform gives decision-makers access to the most current updates to Equinor’s subsurface model ensembles and follow-on analytics.

Additionally, the platform provides a standardized way to present typical data sets, facilitating efficient quality control across different assets.

Finally, Dash enables Equinor’s engineering and front-end development teams to work together more efficiently despite differing skill sets.

Additional Equinor groups working with wind farms and carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects are also developing their own Webviz plugins. Based on the success in subsurface applications, Equinor’s wind group piloted Webviz for offshore wind applications, demonstrating great potential for future fit-for-purpose developments. Similarly, the CCS group began scoping use cases for Webviz to support the analysis of CO2 storage simulation models.

By capitalizing on the flexibility of Dash, Python users regardless of domain expertise are enabled to develop the tools they need, when they need them. Plotly is happy to continue working alongside Equinor as they invest in creating open-source Dash features and developing this critical piece of their data operations infrastructure.

Choosing Dash achieved three goals:

• Grant freedom to create highly customized visualizations not possible elsewhere.
• Easily utilize enhancements in open source communities across industries.
• Equip subsurface engineers working only in Python to create custom, web-based dashboards.