Watching the World: Communicate for gain

Petroleum companies have embraced telecommunications technology, but cautiously.

With a little more daring, they could gain a lot.

This is the view of Mark Lees, business development and strategy manager for the oil and energy sector at Cable & Wireless plc, London.

Cable & Wireless and Schlumberger Technical Services Ltd., Aberdeen, operate a 50-50 joint venture called Omnes. This provides voice, messaging, and data communications equipment and services to U.K. companies.

One of the most exciting prospects is using this new technology to send live data from seismic survey vessels, after initial processing offshore, to full-scale processing centers onshore.

Omnes proved the technology in 1995, said Lees, when Canmar Explorer III survey ship collected data off the Seychelles and sent it back to London for processing.

"What would normally have been a 3-month survey took 3 weeks," said Lees. "This was a significant benefit to operator Enterprise Oil plc, London. The technique is still very formative, but this is the way forward for seismic data handling."

Conservatism

Yet operators have not been keen to build on this project, maintains Lees.

Instead they have reverted to the conservatism typical of the oil industry.

"One company did a survey off Angola recently," he said. "After 6 months, it found it was surveying the wrong place. The company later admitted it would have spotted this earlier with online data processing. A few more mistakes like this in remote locations, and online data links will rocket."

Lees also envisions online links from downhole equipment helping with reservoir management and increased use of unmanned platforms controlled from remote locations.

"In the future, we could talk directly to experts when they are not reachable by normal means," said Lees, "and we could establish online video links for such work as site surveys.

"Design teams could be spread around the world. Projects could be run on a 24-hr basis, with 8 hr work by each of three shifts, and data transfer at the end of each shift. This could halve project times, saving millions of dollars."

Future

While there is rapid development in telecommunications technology at the moment, Lees believes the industry is reaching a point where there must be a slowdown.

"Developments over the next few years will be of applications to use current technology being installed rather than yet more new technologies," said Lees.

"In the future, services will become faster, more reliable, and more secure, but the basic technologies won't change much. Companies will start to use trial technologies like ATM more."

ATM stands for Asynchronous Transfer Mode, used to send data and images at speeds as fast as 155 megabits/sec, allowing complex graphics to be sent in seconds rather than hours as before.

Lees said most petroleum firms now have corporate voice and messaging systems and are exploring data transfer. His mission is to persuade people to ask more often: "What extra can communications do for me?"