Collaborative Environment Infrastructure in Al-Khafji Joint Operations, A Case Study

Abstract

Abstract In today’s exploration and production (E&P) industry, information technology has become a critical component to support business and operational processes. The increasing volume of petrotechnical data with high-resolution 3D seismic data sets and well logs, combined with real-time data acquisition from well sites requires scalable and robust computing infrastructure. E&P specific challenges, such as remote operation, shortage of experts, and knowledge retention, require changes in the working environment from a specialized and isolated traditional workflow to a multidiscipline collaborative workflow. This collaborative working environment requires technology to enable geoscientists and reservoir engineers to work in an interrelated way. The collaborative working environment can be enhanced further with a virtual workspace to overcome physical distance of collaboration with remote locations. This paper describes the collaborative environment infrastructure project in Al-Khafji Joint Operations (KJO). Located in Al-Khafji, the border region between Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, KJO has to cope with the E&P specific challenges mentioned above. The project included the design and implementation of an information technology infrastructure to enable a collaborative environment, various geoscientist workflow tools, data management and human interaction.