Navigating Market Volatility in Oil & Gas with Aspen Fidelis

The oil and gas industry in recent months has experienced market volatility due to geopolitical tensions, shifting government policies and fluctuating energy prices. For example, according to Deloitte’s 2025 Oil and Gas Industry Outlook, global upstream investments in the exploration and production phase in locating oil/gas reserves are expected to decline by 2% this year. This plateau is driven by geopolitical tensions, unpredictable large-scale changes and uncertainty, and the ongoing energy transition to low-carbon technologies, cleaner fuels, and carbon capture projects.

These scenarios highlight the broader challenges faced by the oil and gas industry in 2025, including decreased production levels, reduced revenues, and tightened capital expenditures.

With these on-going issues, many companies are experiencing supply chain delays, price swings and operational inefficiencies that threaten their profitability. Aspen Fidelis empowers operators seeking stability amid uncertainty to model potential disruptions and assess their financial impact before those disruptions occur.

A Powerful Solution for Scenario Planning and Risk Management

By simulating a wide range of operational, market, and failure scenarios, Aspen Fidelis is a powerful tool that enables companies to develop proactive strategies that enhance resilience, optimize asset utilization, prioritize capital investments, and improve long-term profitability across the entire value chain. Aspen Fidelis offers numerous advantages for addressing these specific challenges:

Managing Supply Chain Delays

Aspen Fidelis detects bottlenecks across the asset lifecycle, which enables companies to proactively improve system through-put and reduce delays. In order to optimize logistics and mitigate risks, Fidelis simulates scenarios which model supply chain disruptions and external factors. Fidelis uses digital twin technology to monitor and optimize supply chain performance in real-time. Smooth operations are ensured as Aspen Fidelis determines the optimum number of spares needed during supply chain disruptions.

Mitigating Price Swings

Better decision making aligned with financial goals is enabled when Aspen Fidelis integrated with Aspen Mtell qualifies the risks associated with fluctuating market conditions. Helping managers balance costs against potential revenue gains during price swings, Fidelis uses cost-benefit analysis to simulate financial impacts of operational strategies. By analyzing reliability and availability impacts on profitability, Aspen Fidelis facilities lifecycle cost decisions by providing insights into long term cost optimization.

Addressing Operational Inefficiencies

Aspen Fidelis improves efficiency by providing system-wide performance modeling by going beyond equipment-level analysis to predict future asset performance across entire systems. Often over-design or under-design among other things, can be sources of inefficiencies, Fidelis provides root cause analyses to enhance system resilience. Predictive maintenance strategies which simulate equipment failures and repairs are used by Fidelis to provide proactive maintenance planning to reduce unplanned downtime. By reducing CAPEX by over 5% through design redundancy optimization and better resource allocation, Fidelis provides Capital Expenditure optimization.

Enhancing Profitability

Through improved availability and optimized operations, Aspen Fidelis demonstrates the ability to increase production by over 3%.  Decision-makers are empowered with actionable insights from “what-if” simulations, by Aspen Fidelis’ data-driven decision support maximizing economic outcomes. Ensuring investments yield maximum return Aspen Fidelis accurately calculates ROI for Capital projects and operational improvements.

Using this powerful tool, oil and gas companies are able to navigate supply chain disruptions, reduce the impact of price volatility, resolve inefficiencies in their operations, and improve overall financial performance.

CASE STUDY:

At a large petrochemical complex, a supply chain disruption threatened to halt production. A sudden geopolitical event caused a critical port used for importing essential feedstock to close temporarily. This created an immediate risk of delayed deliveries, which would lead to a halt in polyethylene and other downstream product lines, affecting both production timelines and revenue.

In response, the company turned to Aspen Fidelis to model the potential impact of the disruption and explore alternative solutions.

The operations team quickly input data into the system, simulating various “what-if” scenarios. They tested the impact of rerouting feedstock via an alternative port and also examined the possibility of sourcing material from a different regional supplier. Aspen Fidelis ran these simulations in real time, calculating not just the production impact but also the increased costs of logistics and potential risks to customer contracts.

Through scenario modeling, Fidelis helped the team understand that rerouting through the alternative port would increase logistics costs by 12%, while sourcing from a new supplier would cause a delay of 5 days. However, using a combination of both options could minimize the production downtime and meet key delivery deadlines.

Cost/benefit analysis conducted by Aspen Fidelis revealed that the rerouting option, while costly, would allow for continued production with minimal delays. Additionally, it highlighted the importance of adjusting customer delivery expectations to mitigate financial penalties.

Aspen Fidelis also helped optimize inventory management by determining the exact spare parts and buffer stock levels needed to prevent further disruptions should the delay extend longer than expected. With this data, the company expedited its procurement process for critical parts and adjusted its maintenance schedule.

As a result, the company managed to sustain production at near-full capacity, meet customer demands, and reduce the financial impact of the geopolitical disruption. What could have been a significant supply chain crisis was mitigated through proactive scenario planning, precise risk modeling, and data-driven decision-making enabled by Aspen Fidelis.

Strategic Advantages of Aspen Fidelis

In today’s volatile market environment, agility is key, and Aspen Fidelis provides oil and gas operators with the insights they need to stay ahead of the curve.

Risk-adjusted planning:

By balancing resilience with profitability during uncertain times, companies are able to stay ahead of the potential global tensions, political policies and price fluctuations.

Market-driven simulations:

Help align production strategies with real-time price forecasts, by enabling more responsive and profitable decision-making.

Integrated scheduling tools:

These tools enable refineries to optimize output even in the face of supply chain disruptions.

There is a regional and global trend toward adopting advanced modeling tools to address challenges in the oil and gas industry. Because companies are focusing on digital transformation and operational excellence, they are looking to Aspen Fidelis to capitalize on how to navigate global trends and enhance decision-making under uncertainty, improve system reliability, and maintain profitability amid market volatility and supply chain disruptions.

TRM has been working with clients and their data sets for many years across industries. Contact us so we can show you Aspen Fidelis in action and what it is capable of in the context of your operations and collected data. You will be impressed with what the solutions deliver and clearly see how Aspen Fidelis can improve your approach to Process Simulation.

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