When producers have very little control over the market price of their main product, reining in costs and maximizing efficiency become all the more important. Ensuring that a company is efficient, productive and cost-effective is paramount. But for producers to understand their asset life cycle, analyze all parts of their business and then predict where to shift focus to ensure future success is a complex task fraught with risk and uncertainty.

Or at least it has been. New technologies that digitize the workplace and connected devices that boost innovation are transforming the oil and gas industry. Already oil and gas producers are becoming digital businesses, empowered by solutions that help collect and make sense of data to boost decision-making. This, combined with increased automation and enhanced collaboration, drives operational excellence and results in higher production, reduced costs and higher margins.

But that’s just the beginning. As more producers tap into the data available from these digital oil fields—and as more of these disparate systems are connected via the cloud—they will be able to monitor, analyze and predict outcomes for every part of the reservoir life cycle. As more producers embrace connected oil fields, they will be able to ensure they are operating at peak efficiency without sacrificing safety, reliability or reduced risk.

Producers are recognizing the increasingly important role technology will continue to play in the coming years. In a recent survey of 229 oil and gas industry professionals, 80% of oil and gas companies said they plan to invest the same amount or more in digital technologies over the next three to five years.

Mobility, infrastructure and collaboration technologies currently represent the biggest investment areas across the oil and gas industry, according to the survey. But over the next three to five years, investments are expected to increase in big data, the Internet of Things (IoT) and automation. The key reasons companies are investing in digital technologies are to improve the operational efficiency of their most important assets and enable a more productive workforce, leveraging actionable knowledge
and expertise across their organizations.

Digital oil fields drive near-term tech investments
The increased investments in data collection technologies (software, smart sensors and devices) also will continue in the near term. And with the exponential growth in the storage, compute and predictive analytic capabilities of the cloud, these technologies provide more than just a record of what has happened. They enable near-real-time access to information for actionable insights in the present and future, empowering producers to maximize business outcomes by optimizing existing assets.

By connecting assets via the cloud and taking advantage of machine learning and predictive analytics technologies such as Microsoft Azure Machine Learning, users can gain the ability to predict equipment failures and production disruptions across the value chain, track performance in real time and fine-tune operations to prevent those failures in the future.

As this industry confronts more complex fields with greater extraction challenges, producers must run increasingly large and detailed simulations. These large, high-resolution simulations require large-scale compute resources, which are cumbersome and expensive to host on site. To leverage the power, always-on availability and scalability of the cloud, Schlumberger released the INTERSECT high-resolution simulator in the cloud running on Microsoft Azure, the first reservoir
simulation service in the cloud. The subscription-based model scales with producers’ business needs and makes it possible for companies of all sizes, worldwide, to take advantage of INTERSECT’s high-resolution simulations.

Connected oil fields span reservoir life cycle
Looking slightly further ahead into the future, oil and gas producers will begin connecting even more dots between the data. Historically, the hydrocarbon reservoir life cycle has comprised several very independent silos: One group does upfront exploration analysis, the next creates the field development plan, a new group performs the actual drilling and, finally, it’s the production team’s turn.

Each of these groups has its own set of advanced apps, large stores of data and connected devices. But typically these disparate data stores are not connected to each other. So while digital oil fields can provide actionable insights into specific aspects of a business, it’s not until businesses begin using IoT and the power of cloud computing—merging silos of information and expertise—to create an asset-centric focus on the oil field that they will enable near-real-time history matching. This means closing the “big” loop from finding hydrocarbon deposits and estimating the volume that can be recovered to comparison with the actual production volumes and providing this feedback to the exploration process.

When producers begin tying these processes together to take advantage of the information derived at each step from each team across the life cycle, they will make even larger improvements in time to first oil and total hydrocarbons recovered. But with all of these connections comes huge amounts of data (some producers report collecting up to 1 terabyte of data per day, per well).

Storing and efficiently analyzing this massive amount of data becomes one of the biggest challenges. Now, with almost limitless storage and compute power in the Azure cloud combined with big data analytics capabilities such as HD Insight and Azure Data Lake and the predictive capabilities of Azure ML, producers can tap into that data to derive deeper insights.

Rockwell Automation is using Azure IoT services to extend systems that monitor the equipment involved in producing, moving, refining and selling oil and gas, bringing actionable, predictive insights to its customers across the industry. These solutions go beyond traditional SCADA systems that monitor sensors in real time, ensuring equipment is performing within its specified parameters.

By analyzing real-time operating data and processing through advanced machine learning algorithms, the solution will alert potential problems in the making, enabling producers to take corrective action before an issue is detected that requires more drastic measures. This real-time access to and analysis of data from multiple sources is enabling new business models between oil and gas service providers and owner-operators, delivering value across the entire supply chain.

Together Rockwell Automation and Trigg Technologies are transforming traditional pump, transport and metering equipment with cloud-connected sensors and harnessing the resultant data to provide new forms of insight and value. With a real-time view of the operation of machinery in far-flung and isolated regions, Rockwell Automation is making it possible for Trigg to remotely monitor its assets and take corrective action or dispatch maintenance prior to equipment failure. But above and beyond predictive maintenance, this solution has transformed the custody transfer work processes, providing more accurate and timely measurements for immediate electronic invoicing.

With more and more producers realizing the value inherent in connecting their assets and work processes both to the cloud and to each other, their ability to control costs and maximize production will only grow. There will come a point in the not-too-distant future when oil and gas producers will have such deep insights into their business, at any point in the reservoir life cycle and across the entire oil and gas value chain, that they will know without a doubt that they are working at peak efficiency, extracting, transporting and processing all available hydrocarbons in the fastest, lowest cost and safest way possible. This not only increases the oil and gas companies’ prof tability, it improves the well-being of communities and the natural environment the industry is required to protect.

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