Kick-off at OPTIMIZE24 & delving into 'bio-optimization'

The Oilholic has just concluded his first insightful day at OPTIMIZE24, the thought leadership event for specialist industrial software provider AspenTech. 

The first day of the event's main program saw  attendees from over 50 countries, 20 industries and 100 AspenTech partners who included a veritable who's-who of the energy, manufacturing and industrial complex such as Aramco, Eni, Dow, ExxoMobil, Tennet, Chevron, YPF, OMV and Sabic to name a few. 

Leading technology companies, seen regularly at energy events these days, were also in town including Amazon Web Services and Microsoft who partner on the data side with AspenTech. 

Proceedings were kicked-off by AspenTech CEO Antonio Pietri who summed up the company's ambitions of being a dependable business partner for those looking to improve throughput, firm up their bottomline, improve margins and lower their carbon footprint - all of which are connected. 

Pietri also expressed his enthusiasm for industrial AI as a tool for achieving energy efficiencies, albeit with "guardrails" in place and via a pragmatic approach, in tandem with IIoT and predictive analytics. Ahead of his keynote, the AspenTech also boss kindly spared the time to sit down with the Oilhoic once again, as he has kindly done several times in the past. The resulting and wide-ranging Forbes interview is published here. 

Pietri's keynote set the tone for the sessions that followed. This blogger chose to listen in to how energy majors were attempting to streamline exploration and production, reduce capex and opex, improve health and safety, advance operational excellence and enable the energy transition. 

Many at the venue were happily prepared to give the Oilholic demos and details of upstream and downstream pilot projects to this effect, as well as their existing deployments. 

One key and very interesting theme that made this blogger think was the ongoing re-tuning of the refining complex, which is seeing many European refiners, who once deployed AspenTech solutions to improve efficiencies for the traditional cracking of hydrocarbons, turn to the company's bespoke digital solutions and deploy them produce sustainable bio-fuels. If its a buzzword you seek dear readers - then call it 'bio-optimization'.

Taking in all of its clients global refining optimisation and bio-fuels initiatives, AspenTech claims to have cut 16MT of CO2 emissions in step with $59 billion worth of improved profitability! And on that mammoth refined, or shall we say bio-refined note, its time to bid goodbye for now. We're only just getting started here, so more to follow tomorrow. Keep reading, keep it here, keep it 'crude'! 

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© Gaurav Sharma 2024. Photo I: OPTIMIZE24 logo. Photo II: Antonio Pietri, CEO of AspenTech, speaks at OPTIMIZE24, his company's thought leadership conference in Houston, Texas, US on April 30, 2024. © Gaurav Sharma 2024.