Ancala Midstream Unlocks Scalability and Agility for Its Oil and Gas Operations

Managing assets in the oil and gas industry can be challenging. From offshore wells to pipelines to liquefied natural gas plants, a single company could oversee thousands of individual assets that need to comply with complex commercial agreements. EnergySys Limited (EnergySys) aims to simplify asset management using a simple-to-deploy, cloud-native, low code environment.

Its software is powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and provides oil and gas companies the opportunity to configure their own applications and transform their complex businesses. In one compelling example of the value that EnergySys provides, independent operator Ancala Midstream Acquisitions Limited (Ancala Midstream) streamlined asset management for its complex North Sea business by adopting EnergySys’ low code software. Since implementing this cloud-native solution, the oil and gas company is better managing its diverse operations and has achieved newfound business agility.  

In 2021 our partner, Accord Energy Solutions, migrated the application onto the standard cloud EnergySys architecture to deliver the STAR system.  STAR integrates directly with Accord’s CHARM online process model at the heart of the allocation.  Accord also extended the scope to deliver emissions reporting, full shipper access to data through the ODATA interface, automated annual contract administration, mismeasurement business process handling and calculation of all tariff quantities.

Configuring versus Customising Oil and Gas Business Software

In the oil and gas industry, many companies have adopted traditional solutions that meet some, but not all, of their business requirements. This leaves them exposed to risky and time consuming workarounds, or a collection of different – and expensive – software solutions that require a lot of manual intervention to get a clear picture of the data.

A highly customised system would reduce this issue but comes with its own set of challenges. Typically, bespoke solutions like this require a significant amount of time and money to implement, increasing the total cost of ownership considerably. A customised system can also be extremely inflexible. Despite being built around a customer’s specific requirements, if these needs change; like adding a new asset or making a process change, a customer would need to ask a vendor to implement these changes on its behalf. Project costs for this can mount up and cause serious disruption to business. EnergySys believes that its software should be more than customisable—it should be configurable and provide simple-to-use tools for customers to build their own solutions. “Heavy customisation can be expensive and take a long time to deliver,” says Dr. Peter Black, Managing Director of EnergySys. “We chose to use AWS services to build a low code cloud environment where users could configure their own applications, which has been incredibly successful.”

Using EnergySys’ standard cloud environment, oil and gas companies can create innovative applications to meet their unique business needs. Because the system is low code, they do not need to know any programming languages to develop these powerful solutions. This makes delivery far faster and more cost effective than with traditional solutions. The cloud-native environment can also scale as needed to support new users and applications. The backend infrastructure is powered by highly scalable AWS services like Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provides secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload, and AWS Lambda, a serverless, event-driven compute service.

Because EnergySys manages these critical components, its customers can focus on developing innovative solutions to complex business problems rather than maintaining technical infrastructure.  

 

Transforming Ancala Midstream’s Business with EnergySys

Ancala Midstream oversees critical oil and gas infrastructure for the United Kingdom, including the Scottish Area Gas Evacuation (SAGE) Pipeline and SAGE Terminal System. Prior to engaging EnergySys in 2020 the company relied on an aging system that was no longer able to perform critical functions for its business. “We built a whole infrastructure around that system to support it, including spreadsheets and custom databases,” says Ross Matthews, Hydrocarbon Accounting Lead at Ancala Midstream. “We engaged EnergySys to replace these obsolete systems and have one central environment that could handle all of our requirements.” EnergySys was highly recommended to Ancala Midstream by its network of partners. The company trusted that the software could help it comply with commercial obligations and automate key tasks such as reporting—and was proven right.

For example, Ancala Midstream built business intelligence dashboards that automatically display data to its stakeholders, shippers, and suppliers. It no longer needs to manually generate over 1,000 reports and instead provides a simple, self-service environment for its users. Using the cloud-native EnergySys environment, Ancala Midstream can also scale to adapt to changes, such as more assets being added to the SAGE System and emerging regulatory requirements. It can deploy new features and updates across the system in accordance with these changes and configure innovative applications to meet its business needs.

For example, sustainability is a major priority for the oil and gas industry, and Ancala Midstream has a goal to reach net zero carbon emissions. Using EnergySys software, it developed an application that tracks the carbon emissions of its SAGE assets. Ancala Midstream as well as its suppliers and shippers can monitor and better understand their carbon footprint. “For our companies to get to net zero, we have to understand what our emissions are,” says Matthews. “EnergySys is the starting point for achieving this goal.”  

 

Improving Efficiency for the Oil and Gas Industry Using the Cloud

EnergySys is developing powerful solutions that are helping oil and gas companies become more agile, scalable, and adaptable. In the future, it plans to add new features to help its customers better manage thousands of data points and manage critical functions, such as detecting anomalies in its asset performance and predicting maintenance needs.

For Ancala Midstream, its future plans involve optimising its asset management system and developing more advanced applications to handle bespoke customer agreements. EnergySys will continue to be a central part of operations. “We’ve had EnergySys’s software for under 2 years, but we’ve already thrown some pretty tough tasks at it,” says Matthews. “It’s handled these challenges very well.”