Oil and gas companies increasingly are using data to improve drilling practices. Rigs provide massive amounts of data to help engineers optimize well performance to reduce downtime and associated costs. Executives are monitoring the evolution of big-data technology, especially analytics and machine-learning capabilities. The resulting design of efficient preventative maintenance schedules can reduce operational problems.
Amy Zeringue, Chevron Corp. manager of drilling-and-completion information technology, said Chevron leverages daily operational data to reduce nonproductive time and costs (Fig. 1).
"The goal is to make better decisions through high-quality, trusted data based on complete, accurate, and easily available information," Zeringue told Landmark's Innovation Forum & Expo (LIFE) in Houston in August.
Landmark, owned by Halliburton, used LIFE to announce a collaborative effort to develop a cloud computing platform. Collaboration participants will access the code that creates Landmark's DecisionSpace platform and then revise and add to the platform for their company's specific needs.
"Digitalization and increased scientific intensity are the need of the hour for our industry," said Nagaraj Srinivasan, senior vice-president for Landmark and Halliburton Digital Solutions. He lists integration, automation, and better information control as important themes being addressed by industry.
"The voice of the oil field is a combination of hardware and software," Srinivasan said.
Ken Tubman, ConocoPhillips Corp.'s subsurface vice-president, said big data enables Conoco to drill wells faster, accomplishing certain drilling tasks in hours compared with what used to take weeks. Tubman said Conoco Phillips is changing its approach, structuring it to increase efficiencies, while the industry has cut budgets and rig counts pending a rebound in oil prices (Fig. 2).
The company is adopting a much more intentional fit-for-purpose approach to responding to information coming from various equipment sensors. Issues involving safety and environmental protection receive immediate attention while some equipment issues can be handled later.
BP PLC is working with GE Oil & Gas on a pilot partnership with subsurface software company Paradigm involving BP's offshore operations in the Gulf of Mexico.
Dave Feineman, senior advisor on digital technology in BP's upstream technology division, said industry uses digital technologies to develop best operational practices.
GE in October opened a new oil and gas research and development center in Oklahoma City featuring digital technology.
Athabasca improves workflow
Fred Schwering, Athabasca Oil Corp. field development planning specialist, uses Landmark's DecisionSpace to plan well pads and design horizontal wells in the Montney play in Canada. .
Athabasca uses the software for directional design, reserves tracking and analysis, fracturing proximity analysis and interference avoidance, generating field status maps, and budget planning Fig. 3).
"The previous workflow involved planning single pads, one at a time," which was inefficient, Schwering said. He works from a model that considers future additional wells on pads and helps optimize field road routes and pipeline corridors.
The revised work flow enables better collaboration between disciplines within the company, he said. Tangible benefits include:
• Thousands of dollars saved in travel expenses by cutting the number of pad scouting and surveying trips.
• Survey reversions reduced to 1-3 from 6-10.
• Pad-planning cycle times cut to weeks or days from months.
• Hundreds of thousands of dollars saved in decreased pad construction costs by planning all wells at once.
• Increased reservoir coverage.
• Cost savings from better planning for roads and pipeline corridors.
"As we continue to drill wells tighter together, fracturing interference becomes an important issue," Schwering said. "Athabasca uses DecisionSpace to spatially model fracture interference. This modeling has reduced shut-in times on high-volume production wells and prevented lost earnings."
Schwering said DecisionSpace also assists in interference modeling to reduce risk when fracturing near old wellbores or abandoned wellbores.
Athabasca drills stacked laterals to produce light oil and liquids-rich natural gas from unconventional reservoirs predominately in northwestern Alberta (Fig. 4).
Mining data
Jeff Miers, a managing director of Accenture's energy practice, described the oil and gas industry as still being in the early stages of consuming all the real-time data it generates. The industry is integrating massive amounts of information to figure out how to best mine all of it to extract meaningful knowledge, he said.
"We are a big step beyond putting sensors on equipment," Miers said. "The question now is how industry can connect to the information from all those pieces in an efficient way."
Operators are working on ways to share selected information among service companies and other vendors. A project might involve 10-40 suppliers. "The new wave is to figure out how to get those folks to work together and share information," Miers said. Progress is also occurring at coordinating data flows both between operators and suppliers and within different departments at the operator.
The prolonged oil-price slump is forcing drillers to look beyond tweaking drillbit design and other incremental improvements. They seek broader business practice changes to increase performance and cut costs.
Srikanta Mishra, Battelle Energy fellow in Columbus, Ohio, believes better data analytics and drilling technology might prove key in determining whether oil and gas companies thrive. Drilling operations can produce up to 15 terabytes of data per well, making big data a prime target for improvement, Mishra said.
Real-time streaming data from rigs can be compared with historical drilling data to help predict and prevent problems and better understand operational risks, said Mishra, who specializes in subsurface fluid dynamics modeling and data analytics activities (Fig. 5).
"As the drillbit is proceeding, operators are learning about the formation and gathering information about the drilling process," to ensure wellbore quality and stability, Mishra said. Some companies use open-source software for data analytics while others buy commercial software from vendors such as SAS. Some large international majors develop their own software.
It's becoming increasingly common for service companies to have a chief data scientist tasked with helping internal and external clients handle information technology and big data analytics.
Olga Koper, Battelle's energy business development leader, said oil and gas companies create their own analytics departments in house or hire consults to help drilling engineers analyze available data. She sees industry working to bridge a gap between data scientists and petroleum engineers.
Mishra said big-data techniques and algorithms for the oil and gas industry are fairly uniform, enabling repeatable processes. He compared it to reservoir simulation in that an overall workflow can be customized as needed for a particular basin.
"Each model is going to be very specific," depending on the play or subplay's characteristics, he said.
Shell, Anadarko programs
"What you can measure, you can improve," Sushma K. Bhan, general manager technical data for Shell well, reservoir, and facility management, said in a LIFE presentation on Shell's automated analytics. Shell's Wells, Reservoir, and Facility Management (WRFM) program globally maximizes production from existing assets through standardized practices and knowledge sharing, Bhan said
Anadarko Petroleum Corp. developed its own digital oilfield and information technology system, Integrated Production Surveillance and Operation (IPSO). The company developed separate pilot IPSOs for onshore and offshore.
Steve Randolph, Anadarko director of production technology, said Anadarko has had digital sensors in the field since the late 1990s. He told LIFE participants that Anadarko launched an intentional digital data-monitoring initiative in 2006 to "get the guy with the pencil off the top of the tank."
Anadarko wanted to manage 25,000-40,000 wells via an enterprise-wide system. The independent plans to eventually merge its offshore and onshore IPSOs into one platform even though the two platforms were developed in separate pilots.
Anadarko uses its IPSOs to measure, control, and monitor integrated workflows. The goal is for engineers of various disciples-reservoir, drilling, completion, and production-to look at one set of real-time information.
The IPSOs enable Anadarko to link data gathered across different company departments for better and low-cost information sharing.
"So far, it costs less than drilling one well in North America," Randolph said when asked about how much Anadarko had spent on IPSO technology.
Managing vs analyzing
David Hicks, senior vice-president of IHS Markit, said the industry still spends too much time managing data and not enough time analyzing it.
"Things have certainly gotten better… But really when I look at data quality and data management, we still have a lot of opportunities here."
Julie Sweet, Accenture group chief executive North America, said: "We see big data and digital technology as presenting opportunities to achieve predictable outcomes…and to use the cycle to come out of the downturn as a stronger company." She encouraged LIFE participants to "future-proof your technology by creating platforms that are going to work with lots of different technologies and platforms."
GE outlines digital future of oil, gas industry
The merger of big data and cloud-based analytics can help the oil and gas industry shift from a mindset of increasing production to one of maximizing productivity, lowering costs while maintaining operating flexibility, GE Oil & Gas said in a white paper titled "Digital Future of Oil & Gas & Energy."
GE outlined the industrial internet's benefits to industry as:
• Asset performance management to minimize cost, increase reliability, and optimize performance for an individual piece of equipment.
• Operations optimization for system-wide improvements and life-cycle management with increased production, lower costs, and reduced risk.
• Enterprise optimization of cash-generating assets.
Operations optimization
Industry can drive value by finding a way to integrate its fragmented operational information systems, GE said.
"For example, there may be a system that manages logging data during a drilling process, another system that manages logistics and fleet for supply chain, another for monitoring and diagnostics of artificial lift equipment, and so on."
GE suggests that improved data management across upstream, midstream, and downstream workflows can enable more efficient capital and human resource allocation and improve maintenance decisions.
"A better understanding of the performance of different onshore wells can help optimize the deployment of crews, dispatching them to the locations where interventions can be most beneficial, while avoiding wasteful transit routes from well to well," the paper said.
Industry is at risk of losing a significant portion of its expertise to retirement over the next few years. Digital knowledge-capture and case-management capabilities give companies the ability to retain knowledge that they otherwise lose when these experts retire, GE said.
Best practices
Digital tools can give oil and gas companies a connected view across various business units, sites, and divisions, GE said. Companies can identify top-performers to improve operations globally. For example, a company may have one plant operating at 97% uptime while another operates at 83%.
"With a connected view of global operations, an operator can identify what practices are driving the stronger performance and then apply those practices to the lesser performing facilities," the white paper said.
As equipment, processes, and operations come online, operators can leverage real-time knowledge to make better decisions. "If an operator can use data to drive a 1% improvement in fleet reliability, the impact can be measured in millions of dollars per year," GE said.