Making Data Pay

Abstract

There is talk about digital oil fields and big data and some striking examples of their power. But in real oil fields, a lot of operators are still running fields with systems relying on big paper. Since retiring from Chevron where he worked on introducing digital oilfield technology, Jim Crompton has advised smaller operators and learned that “80% are operating on paper” and many control systems using established computerized control systems such as SCADA are “the next generation.” To describe the state of the oilfield technology during a presentation at the recent SPE Digital Energy Conference and Exhibition in The Woodlands, Texas, Crompton, an adviser with Noah Consulting, quoted a well-known science fiction writer, William Gibson, who said, “The future is here, it is just not evenly distributed.” The speakers at the conference pointed out a widely shared problem for those working in this field: while much data is gathered, little of it is used. For example, about 5% of the real-time data from a drillship are sent to shore to help monitor and control drilling, he said. At the corporate level, the industry has been a leading user of computer power and advanced analysis methods for engineering and managing the enterprise. Exploration and production (E&P) companies own some of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, which are used to do the seismic studies that are the foundation of reservoir models. But frequently, they are unable to update those models with results from producing fields. “Analytics is used on an enterprise level, but no one is looking at how to use it on an operational basis so we can run data on models of wells or reservoirs as we gather the data,” said Moray Laing, executive lead consultant for oil and gas at the SAS Institute, during a panel discussion at the conference.