Nitrogen+Syngas 368 Nov-Dec 2020
30 November 2020
The year we went digital
“Digitalisation also brings its own headaches”
This year has been one of the stranger ones in my life, and I’m sure yours as well. Looking back from the perspective of late October 2020, I had no idea at the start of the year how much time I was going to be spending in my study rather than in the office or a hotel! Covid has forced major lifestyle changes upon all of us this year, and it has definitely accelerated some trends that were already making themselves felt, but which have suddenly become a major part of our forced adaptation to strange times. I haven’t used cash since March, for example, except at one stubborn local takeaway that can’t take contactless payments. Perhaps the greatest of these changes has been enforced remote working, and that has meant looking at digital technologies and the way we can use them. Even those of us who are, shall we say, not digital natives or early adopters, have had to become intimate with both the potential and the pitfalls of Zoom, Teams and all of the rest.
The chemical industry is also typically a very conservative one, and the bulk chemical industry more so than most sectors. It is not a virtual industry, but one where large volumes of very real material must be assembled, processed, and then distributed. When dealing with large quantities of reactive materials, the impulse to stick with the tried and tested can be a matter of safety as much as commerce, and when plant downtime can mean millions of dollars of lost production per day that it is not operational, and start-ups can take days, the impetus can run against major innovation. Change tends to be incremental rather than radical. Furthermore, large sunk costs and ageing infrastructure may mean that it is not possible for a company to take full advantage of the potential solutions on offer. Nevertheless, with licensors and contractors often not able to travel because of quarantine restrictions or even insurance issues, 2020 has forced new ways of working onto the industry as well, especially as regards plant construction and commissioning, but also for routine maintenance and advice.
As our article on pages 50-61 this issue showcases, there are now a plethora of digital solutions being offered by companies involved in the nitrogen and syngas sectors. As distributed control systems have spread across plants both old and new, so this has greatly increased the amount of data that can be harvested by plant operators. Of course, as my old chemistry professor would have said – “data is not information” – and the means of transforming the one into the other are a variety of modelling and analysis software and artificial intelligence applications such as neural networks, from process simulation via ‘digital twin’ plants to operational optimisation and predictive maintenance scheduling. The advent of the ‘internet of things’, smart sensors, ‘big analytics’, data visualisation and a host of other related technologies has led to the concept of ‘Industry 4.0’, where computers are able to make decentralised decisions without human intervention, with ‘human in the loop’ monitoring only for higher level functions.
But of course, digitisation also brings its own headaches; new vulnerabilities, security risks and potential points of failure, which are especially concerning for safety critical systems. It brings issues such as cyber-security and handling of sensitive data to the fore, and the digital architecture of a company’s intranet, and how that interacts with the outside world, are part and parcel of the new world that we are operating in.
Perhaps it’s my age, but it’s hard not to feel sometimes that we are losing something as well as gaining it. A teleconference can’t carry the nuance of a face to face meeting, and perhaps a feed from a plant monitoring suite isn’t quite the same as walking around a site and examining the pipework. Still, the economics speak for themselves, and it is a trend that can only accelerate as we enter the decade ahead.
