Overview
SIMEC Energy Australia (SEA) is a member of the GFG Alliance, an international group of industrial, mining and energy businesses working together to create a sustainable future for industry and society. SEA’s purpose is to build a renewable energy focused business, delivering low-cost energy, at the lowest emissions and within a sustainable risk framework for the GFG Alliance in Australia.
With a sound renewable energy development and contracting pipeline and a dedicated team of specialists, SEA delivers value across the energy spectrum for the GFG Alliance’s assets that meets today’s needs and GFG’s vision for GREENSTEEL and carbon neutrality by 2030.
The Challenge
SEA optimises a gas portfolio of approximately 8PJ a year, across 4 major operating sites on the east coast and in South Australia. The team at SEA need to be able to move fast and adjust their position and distribution daily. They must be able to work seamlessly with upstream producers and pipeline distributors to ensure that they get the right amount of gas, in the right locations, when they need it.
This means dealing with a great volume of data from AEMO and steelmaking and mining sites. SEA previously managed this process manually with the potential for human error a real risk as is associated with multiple users, multiple data sources and file versions.
Our Solution
SEA turned to Ignite Data Solutions to integrate all AEMO reports into a single platform. Taking feeds from three different gas markets – New South Wales, Victoria, and South Australia as well as multiple industrial and mining sites. The Ignite-built platform gives the SEA team access to accurate data in near real-time.
The team can query on demand and are now able to integrate automation into their bidding and calculations that had previously consisted of time consuming and manual operations. A myriad of benefits has been realised.
Global Gas Prices
Gas prices in Australia fluctuate in response to global changes. Previously, site operators had not had insight into these market variations. The gas price was as low as $5/GJ and today, it is heading beyond $10/GJ. Site operators will soon have visibility to domestic price fluctuations and can plan their operations better, optimising business profitability.
This real time stream of data also gives Hilary’s team greater contract flexibility. They can optimise gas positions so that they are long when the gas price is high and short, when the gas price is low
Build data products to realise repeatable and sustainable business value from data.
- Data Driven Apps
- Customised User Dashboards
- Customised Business Intelligence Reports
- Recommendation Engines
- Measure asset utilisation
- Built-in Artificial Intelligence
“There is a lot less risk of error and we realise resource savings every day. This new platform enables us to spend more time focusing on refining our strategy, rather than having knee jerk reactions to market dynamics.”
“Power BI gives us a data visualisation layer so that we can share details with our sites such that they can see what market volatility looks like and how we control for it. We will be able to easily share data with team members on-site and if things change for them, we can react a lot faster.”
“With improved visibility, we can invite innovative ideas from site operators. This will help us save money, time, and effort. One two-hour outage for a piece of equipment on site can have a massive impact on the gas demand. Ignite has made it easy for us to see this and we can optimise gas storage and market interactions to maximise cost savings outcome.”
Where to next?
“We are all about using the data, focusing on visualisation, educating teams across the business and embedding our new way of working into our operating our rhythm. We just keep discovering more opportunities for efficiency.”
