What Happens When Facebook Technology Meets Oil Well Records

Abstract

A former industry IT expert recently invented a program using open-source social media technology to make the work of inquisitive oil and gas engineers a little more like that of a special agent. Named WellLine, it is the brainchild of Jeff Dalgliesh, the director of oil field digital transformation at Silicon Valley-based Maana, who previously spent 18 years at Chevron as a drilling and completions IT manager. Though similar tools exist, WellLine reflects a couple of important trends taking place across the oil industry’s expanding digital landscape. The first is the speed at which big data solutions can be assembled—in this case, it took less than a single summer with just three people. The other is the expanding encroachment of free and open-source technology into the oil and gas enterprise software domain. “This accelerated pace of development is going to become the norm because a lot of the stuff you’re doing is reusing application components,” Dalgliesh said. “The thing is, if there is good technology out there, just figure out how to use it. That’s Maana’s story—we integrate a bunch of technologies and build applications fast.” Behind WellLine are several non-proprietary query languages, user interface toolsets, and natural language processing (NLP) systems. Each help to thread together thousands of well records from the industry’s most-popular well document management systems and other unconnected databases. This makes searching for well events about as easy and intuitive as checking up on friends and family using Facebook. But instead of birthdays, vacation photos, and marriage announcements, WellLine extracts any desired detail from drilling, production, and intervention reports. A key feature of the product’s dashboard is a chronological timeline (hence the software’s name) of a well that shows every notable event ever recorded. “If you’re a driller and want to see the life history of a well based on all these documents, databases, and production systems, right now you have to go through multiple systems,” Dalgliesh explained. He thinks that by intuitively and quickly unearthing historical data, operators will be better able to flesh out offset-well drilling plans, select workover candidates, or de-risk plug and abandonment operations. Dalgliesh shared details of the new product line for Maana’s platform at the SPE Engenious symposium on upstream innovation in September. The 6-year-old startup has been involved in oil and gas projects since 2016, when it attracted $26 million in venture funding, part of which came from Chevron, Shell, and Saudi Aramco. From the podium, he said that oil and gas companies should start using their data just like a state intelligence agency would. “They would run algorithms on it, and those algorithms would rip it apart, find out who is being talked about, what’s being talked about, and connect it all together,” he said.