The physical, geographic and economic landscape of the oil and gas industry has changed drastically over the past 3 years. Advances in technology and processes have added to this ever-changing landscape and enabled oil and gas companies to explore the concept of a fully automated platform - the digital oil field. It is important that oil and gas executives understand the modern technologies available in order to better manage the growing business complexity of this evolving industry.
The digital oilfield environment
Oil and gas companies continually struggle to achieve sustainable information management. Many executives believe that creating a digital oilfield environment will help them exploit new advancements in technology and processes. To some extent this is true, but developing agile platforms that are not only compatible with future technology and process advancements, but can also leverage current information technology (IT) investments, will be the key to real-time information management.
In order to achieve real-time information, companies must synchronize their infrastructure, application portfolio and "best practice" processes. In other words, they must standardize environments across all assets, as well as their business and operating processes.
Oil and gas companies must consider several challenges when developing a digital oilfield environment. For instance, today's industry software providers offer increasing functional coverage for the upstream oil and gas segment, but software alone cannot bring real-time information. Additional work must be done to establish the architecture and agile platform needed to support these applications and provide the data exchange and integration needed. This becomes particularly challenging and complex when considering the varying infrastructure components required to link platforms to regional offices, and then to global headquarters.
Streamlining the infrastructure
The concept of the digital oil field is often associated with the idea of the "virtual platform," which permits the remote connection of systems, people, processes and data/information.
There are three fundamental drivers for the virtual platform:
• Enablement of high quality collaboration;
• Limited availability of key skill sets or expertise (for example, reservoir and production engineers); and
• The desire to reduce required onsite manpower in dangerous environments.
By creating an agile technology environment, companies create remote control centers in safer environments or geographies to support more real-time collaboration across the entire enterprise. These remote control centers facilitate safety by helping to reduce the necessary manpower on remote platforms or in dangerous environments. They also provide greater collaboration with engineering experts who would normally not be on site.
Collaboration becomes increasingly important in the realm of real-time drilling because the virtual environment permits more engineering resources to monitor real-time drilling operations while physically in another location. In turn, it leverages key expertise across multiple locations while reducing travel requirements.
This virtual connectivity is enabled by standard technology solutions and also by consistent and repeatable processes across all assets. This standardization of toolsets and processes greatly increases the ability to leverage resources across assets as people only have to learn to use one process and toolset instead of dealing with a unique process, data structure or toolset for each individual asset.
Monitoring and reporting
The virtual platform concept greatly enhances operations monitoring by providing increased visibility to a wider audience of cross-functional expertise; however, this is not without additional challenges.
The digital oilfield environment can rapidly produce an "overload" of real-time data difficult to disseminate or analyze. As a result, it is critical that the application portfolio provides data management capabilities that can effectively address this potential overload. This is an important consideration in the development of the solution sets. This data management capability can take many forms, including:
• More subtle, real-time trending that allows for faster alerting of potential operational anomalies;
• Facilitated correlation of cross-functional data such as operational, well, reservoir or seismic over the same time periods;
• Automated workflow management enabling automated reaction to operational events;
• Greater use of artificial intelligence and rules-based decision engines to reduce operator analysis and decisions; and
• Advanced search capabilities and data cataloging structures to make information easier to find and access.
This enhancement in data management provides an additional benefit of improving reporting capabilities by:
• Simplifying data extraction and correlation from disparate data sources, enabled through middleware technologies and Web capabilities;
• Improving correlation of cross-functional data to provide more precise reporting of events;
• Improving data reporting to
support impact and root-cause analysis, particularly in the case of unplanned events or anomalies; and
• Facilitating reporting to multiple stakeholders (as many oil and gas assets are joint ventures).
Lowering risk
In order to lower physical and economic risk in the development and operational phases of oil and gas assets, oil and gas companies should seek an approach to help minimize the risk associated with first-oil and first-year operability targets. A solution with embedded implementation of repeatable processes effectively allows reduction in the asset development cycle time with the added benefit of standardization. With repeatable processes comes a learning curve effect as common solution sets are implemented over multiple assets. Done properly, this can result in reduced cost and faster startup of subsequent implementations.
A leveraged environment, where infrastructure and application components are shared across assets, helps reduce the costs and the economic risk associated with support and maintenance of the digital oilfield environment. Maintenance and upgrades are performed once and shared across assets, rather than having to be repeated across assets with non-standard environments. In addition, enabling of a remote control center and improving operational anomaly notification allows mitigation of physical risks by providing safer environments for operational personnel.
Optimizing production potential
With the recent increase in oil prices and recent reductions in global
production as a result of hurricanes, there is a very strong focus on the optimization of production and production potential. There are a number of factors involved in the optimization of production, but the main driver is production uptime, which is strongly influenced by facility and infrastructure reliability. This is particularly important with some of the newer oil and gas developments that include high production or "prolific" wells. Short durations in production downtime create large economic impact in these high volume assets.
The digital oilfield environment supports improved reliability and consequently optimized production uptime through:
• The use of real-time sensors, improved condition monitoring and alarming and alerting;
• Applications that provide for improved maintenance and inspection productivity;
• The implementation of "edge" technologies (for example, mobility applications or radio frequency indentification) to support maintenance and inspection;
• A link to robust supply chain functions ensuring material and equipment availability for maintenance and repair; and
• Enablement of simultaneous operations (Simops) which optimizes the schedule for multiple functions (operations, maintenance, well support, drilling, etc.) to minimize scheduled down time.
On a day-to-day operational basis, there are a number of optimization applications that can produce incremental gains to production targets through minor changes of operations parameters and controls.
The overall production potential is generally optimized through enhancement projects initiated by reservoir and production engineers. The types of analyses and simulations performed by these engineers often demand large quantities of input data. Consequently, the engineers often spend significant amounts of nonproductive time in data preparation rather than in diagnosis of production issues and analysis, and identification of production improvements. The data management capabilities provided by the digital oilfield environment help reduce the time spent in data preparation and enable more time to be spent in the analysis.
Summary
The oil and gas industry is constantly changing, and the concept of the digital oilfield has the ability to transform the way exploration and production (E&P) activities are performed as well as greatly improve the speed, productivity, results and safety of these processes. However, the development, deployment and operation of the digital oil field present a huge technological challenge akin to the development challenges the oil and gas industry continues to address.
The industry has long been a leader in the application of partnerships and joint ventures to E&P operations. However, information technology partnerships and outsourcing have not seen the same level of adoption in the upstream arena. The partnering of IT service providers and oil and gas companies in the development of the digital oil field can help enable the achievement of this concept and help manage the industry's ever changing landscape. The challenges for these partnerships lie in understanding the true business value provided, and the development of trusted working relationships between the partners as they jointly develop an effective digital oilfield solution.

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