European Automation and Control Solutions Market in Oil and Gas Industry, Forecast to 2022

Evolution Of Business Models and the Way Service is Offered Through Collaborative Operations and Better Utilization of Captured Data Respectively are Expected to be Prevalent Over the Forecast Period

This study mainly focuses on European Automation and Control Solution (ACS) market (2017-2022) and its application in O&G industries. The product segmentation in this study includes Distributed Control System (DCS), Safety Instrumented Systems (SIS), Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA), Programmable Logic Controller (PLC), Human Machine Interface (HMI), Manufacturing Enterprise System (MES), and Industrial Asset Management (IAM).

Russia has been excluded from this study; however, the perspective from market participants and leaders from various regions of Europe are obtained to understand the latest market/technology trends. The regional shares for ACS market and their respective revenue details are also provided in the study. The dependence of the oil and gas (O&G) industry on automation has increased in the last decade, and this is expected to double by 2020. As a result of project cancellation followed by the fall in crude oil prices from 2014-2016, multiple rounds of industry layoffs were announced that left O&G companies with a reduced number of skilled workers.

This increased the dependence of Oil companies on automation in order to complete the processes without any delay. Initiatives to digitize oil fields are being implemented, and this had led to investing in instrumentation in order to increase productivity and complete projects within defined budgets and timelines. These initiatives have been found to be extremely beneficial, especially in offshore rigs, to gathering production data in a timely manner. The automation sector has evolved from supplying hardware equipment with aftermarket services to becoming more service-based, offering software tools that can translate huge volumes of data into meaningful, intelligent information that can be leveraged to make important business decisions.

The trend of selling individual control systems-such as distributed control system (DCS), Supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA), safety instrumented system (SIS), manufacturing execution system (MES), and industrial asset management(IAM)-has changed as demand for an integrated system with multiple functionalities has found to increase. Currently, automation vendors are working toward building the Internet of Things (IoT) platforms to connect plants from various locations. These IoT platforms eliminate the need for workers to go to hazardous locations for standard monitoring purposes by enabling remote monitoring capabilities.

These platforms can connect every system in every plant at every location, which improves the plant operations visibility to the service-providers, customers and plant managers who are responsible for decision making. Although the 'digital oilfield’ technology has significant growth opportunities within the O&G industry, its full-scale adoption is being limited by the numerous challenges. Some of those are lack of sufficient cyber security, lack of standardization across platforms and conservative mindset of the top management of the end user companies. However, with more investments in IoT platforms that offers advanced cyber security and protocol compatibility, it is predicted that these challenges will be soon addressed in addition to plant connectivity.