A roadmap to accelerate OSDU adoption

Abstract

The upstream oil and gas subsurface industry traditionally has invested in rich and complex data sets to solve geoscience challenges. The benefit of those data sets is often realized by domain experts applying specialist workflows to drive exploration, appraisal, and production decisions. However, the siloed nature of the industry's workflows often results in knowledge being stranded in specialist applications, which prevents the value from being shared with a wider team to build upon and drive more informed business decisions. In recent years, key trends within the industry have included the transition of data and applications from on premises to cloud hosting and the collective investment in the Open Subsurface Data Universe (OSDU) initiative. The overall objective of these efforts is to unlock the value of data by liberating knowledge from specialist silos and empower end users to apply best-in-class tools, workflows, or artificial intelligence/machine learning algorithms to solve complex subsurface problems. This paper focuses on the practical considerations of implementing subsurface digital transformation and the challenges of providing high-quality curated data to end users. A case study demonstrates delivering a digital core database, integrating it with corporate well-log data stored in OSDU, and making it available through a common platform to enable easy end-user access to unlock the value of the data in driving more accurate decisions in the field.