Big Data vs. Diverse Data: Confidential Databases Lack Performance Benchmarks

Abstract

Carlos Castañeda is hungry for more data and analysis from coiled tubing jobs, and the manager of coiled tubing engineering at Pioneer Energy Services said he also needs to know how his company’s work compares with the competition. Pioneer is one of more than 25 companies relying on CoilData for real-time monitoring. The data and analysis can tell him which of his people is efficiently drilling out plugs left after fracturing and the ones who may need retraining. What he does not have is a measure of how his company’s work compares with competing well-intervention companies because the data needed to do that are confidential. “If you are an individual service company, you are looking at your pipe in isolation,” said Paul Brown, the CEO and founder of CoilData. He sees great value in the data he has collected from more than 155,000 jobs monitored over the past 10 years, but tapping it will require companies to decide if the competitive advantage of analysis based on industry benchmarks exceeds the value of the current level of confidentiality. Recently he presented a rare multicompany look at how coiled tubing companies manage their most critical asset, coiled tubing strings. The paper presented at the SPE/ICoTA Well Intervention Conference and Exhibition showed significant differences in how much use companies got out of 3,700 tubing strings studied (SPE 194306). It raised the question: Are they leaving money on the table by prematurely retiring tubing strings that cost about $250,000 each? The Bigger Picture For those with no interest in well workover, it also raised a larger question about decision making. It showed how service company decisions vary widely when each company is operating in data isolation. Brown’s discussion of the results also showed how the available information on decision making can be limited and subjective. Brown has a unique perspective based on a career where he used his software and analytical skills to create tools to gather, monitor, and analyze well interventions. He offers many reasons for why companies stop using strings of coiled tubing. But the study showed a significant number of examples where the string’s cumulative metal fatigue—an estimate used to predict the likelihood of failure—was so low it suggested the tubing could have been used longer without a significant risk of failure. “They must have had a reason for doing it, but it might have been a bad reason,” he said. The qualifier “might” is required because only the company using the string can see what it looks like or know all the details about how it was used or abused.