ERC is piloting new AI agent to predict equipment failures

The Egyptian Refining Company (ERC) is piloting an AI agent that predicts equipment failures before they happen. The agent could help solve a big problem — every day its refinery is offline costs USD 5 mn in lost income, Qalaa Holdings founder and Chairman Ahmed Heikal said at the EnterpriseAM Egypt Forum yesterday. A restart takes seven days, so a single outage costs USD 35 mn. “We don’t have the luxury of doing it wrong,” he said.

How it works: The agent is trained to recognize “healthy and unhealthy signatures” of ERC’s machinery, head of digital transformation Ramy Harfoush told the audience. It monitors pressure, temperature, vibration, and flow data for patterns that preceded past failures and pulls together a maintenance case on its own, complete with past work orders, root-cause failure analysis reports, and even checks on whether spare parts are in stock and lead times if they aren’t. The package then goes to ERC’s maintenance and reliability engineers who validate it and schedule an outage before the equipment fails.

AI is also cutting energy use at cement plants: At ASEC Automation, a subsidiary of Qalaa’s ASEC Holding, CTO Ahmed Imam said an energy management system reads SCADA data from cement plants and recommends set points for the grinding area. Grinding consumes about 40% of a plant’s power and provides a key process for ensuring consistent fineness, protecting heavy machinery, and optimizing energy consumption.

Maintenance is also one of several areas where Qalaa is deploying AI. At Dina Farms, drones can read the color of crops to tell if they need more fertilizer or pesticide, lifting yields to 21-22 tons per feddan, up from 18 tons, Heikal said. Some of the agents Qalaa builds could eventually be commercialized, he added.

But it’s not all rosy when it comes to AI and tech: Cybersecurity is the risk that worries Heikal most. Three recent attacks saw oil and gas companies pay out “huge sums of money” to unlock their data, he told the audience, without providing further detail. He’s also wary of industries that robotics could pull back to developed markets, pointing to textiles in particular. Robots working 24 hours a day at a fraction of emerging-market unit labor costs could potentially, within a decade, reverse the flow of manufacturing investments in Egypt, he said.