The future of BP's

Field of the Future

Shell and HP's

wireless seismic
technology

March 2010 Issue 23

Finding hydrocarbons with dielectric resonance

How good are geologists?
Finding oil in the university library
Dangers of "workflow"
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Associate Member
™
 “Unintended
Consequences”
Did oil majors make a mistake when they started
decreasing research spending in the 1980s?
Consultant Editor, Digital Energy Journal
Recently I’ve become intrigued by the apparent
conservatism of the oil & gas industry in respect
of the uptake of new technologies. And the more
March 2010 Issue 23 I read, the more I realise that many others have
trod this path before me.
The other day I came across the July 2007
Digital Energy Journal report by the US National Petroleum Council
213 Marsh Wall, London, E14 9FJ, UK entitled “Facing the hard truths about energy”
Digital Energy Journal is part of Finding Petroleum which included a Topic Paper (one of 38 men-
www.findingpetroleum.com tioned in the full report) on “Oil and Gas Tech-
www.digitalenergyjournal.com nology Development”.
Tel +44 (0)207 510 4935 This paper examined the lessons of histo-
Fax +44 (0)207 510 2344 ry and current trends in oil and gas technology
development and deployment so as to make pre-
Editor dictions for the future.
Karl Jeffery
It recognized that technology has played a
fundamental role in supporting the efficient pro-
jeffery@d-e-j.com
duction of hydrocarbons and that, as oil and gas
technologies are often destined for hostile, hard-
Consultant editor to-reach environments such as deep offshore
David Bamford waters or in the high temperature and pressure
encountered at the bottom of a well, full-scale
Technical editor tests must be completed before a technology can
Keith Forward be proved and the market will accept it.
forward@d-e-j.com As a result, there is a view that commer-
cializing technology in the oil and gas market is
Finding Petroleum London Forums generally costly and time intensive, exhibiting
Advances in geophysics - March 16 time-to-market characteristics that are consis-
Gas and unconventional gas - April 27 tent with other heavy industries, such as min-
Deepwater - May 26 ing, steel production, and power generation.
Russia - June 22 Whereas consumer goods might progress
Marginal fields - September from drawing board to store shelves in less than
Exploration technology and business Oct 7-8 two years, oilfield technologies consistently re-
Oil supply and demand - November quire 15 to 20 years to complete the same mat-
Digital energy technology December uration cycle.
While this is advantageous to the
Social network providers of established technologies - the com-
network.findingpetroleum.com petition isn’t exactly rushing in to displace their
‘cash cows’ - it makes the sector unattractive to
Advertising and sponsorship investors and limits the industry’s ability to re-
Alec Egan act to changing environments and to enter new
Tel +44 (0)203 051 6548 domains.
aegan@onlymedia.co.uk The paper includes data gathered by McK-
insey and Company comparing time-to-market
Digital Energy Journal is a magazine for oil and values for the consumer products, medical,
gas company professionals, geoscientists, engi- telecommunications, and oil field sectors. Fif-
neers, procurement managers, IT professionals, teen oil and gas exploration and production
commercial managers and regulators, to help technologies were studied, yielding an average
you keep up to date with developments with proof-of-concept to widespread commercial
digital technology in the oil and gas industry. sales time of about 16 years.
The history of 3D seismic illustrates this
Subscriptions: Apply for your free print or elec- point. Exxon undertook the first 3D seismic sur-
tronic subscription to Digital Energy Journal on vey in 1967, and subsequent field projects in the
our website www.d-e-j.com early 1970s confirmed the usefulness of the ap-
proach. Early surveys were expensive to acquire
and process, but as the industry gained famil-
Cover photo: The use of Advanced Collaborative
iarity with the methodology, then costs and pro-
Environments and real time tools for monitoring cessing and interpretation times for 3D seismic
and optimising wells and equipment are very came down.
much part of 'business as usual' across BP's global By the early 1980s, trade journals had a
portfolio of assets. Photo courtesy BP number of articles supporting the 3D seismic
approach, but it still took many years for the oil
and gas industry to fully embrace it.
For two important exploration areas, the
Gulf of Mexico and the North Sea, 3D seismic
reached 50% of the market in roughly 1988,
about 21 years after the first 3D seismic survey,
this time being required to refine the technolo-
gy, reduce costs and overcome industry conser-
vatism.
Horizontal drilling is another case in point.
Some of the earliest development of horizontal
drilling took place in the 1940s in California,
Printed by Printo, spol. s r.o., 708 00 Ostrava-Poruba,
but true development and deployment of hori-
Czech Republic. www.printo.cz
David Bamford
zontal drilling began in the USA in the mid-
1970s. Many technical issues needed to be over-
come, including the drilling methods them-
selves, new ways to log horizontal wells, and
new completion techniques.
Key technical innovations supporting hor-
izontal, or directional drilling, came in the
1980s with the introduction of down-hole steer-
able motors that could be controlled from the
surface and MWD, or measurements-while-
drilling, that provided position, temperature,
pressure, and porosity data while the borehole
was being drilled.
Nevertheless, the higher cost, as well as
higher risk, of horizontal drilling put off many
companies but, with time, acceptance of hori-
zontal drilling methods increased as more and
more success stories were demonstrated.
From 1,000 horizontal wells drilled in
1990, the number rose to 20,000 in 2000. The
decades-long adoption of horizontal wells is a
classic example of the adoption of a ‘new’ tech-
nology as costs come down, implementation im-
proves, and risks are better understood and man-
aged.
Importantly, the paper also recognizes that
the sources of technology destined for the oil
and gas markets have changed over time as,
starting in the early 1980s, the major oil and gas
companies began to decrease their research and
development (R&D) spending, driven in large
part by a decision to “buy versus build” new
technology; independent oil and gas companies
have historically spent little on R&D.
Service companies stepped in to partially
fill the void by increasing their R&D spending
and, given today’s R&D spending trends, new
technologies must largely come from service
and startup companies. Thus, one area of risk is
the availability of sufficient R&D funds from
service company and entrepreneurial sources to
create these new technologies.
The paper asserts that a recent trend is that
major operators have become increasingly risk-
averse as new projects have become more cost-
ly, less economical, and technically more chal-
lenging and that they may consider the applica-
tion of new technology to be a riskier proposi-
tion than keeping existing proven approaches.
Thus the technical innovator may be forced to
offer discounts to encourage oil and gas compa-
nies to try a new approach.
Consequently, there is downward pressure
on prices as discounts are applied to get early
sales, leaving the innovator to rely on capturing
new or increased market share - as a result of
introducing the new technology - to deliver a
return on R&D expenditures.
Thus, I would assert that we have an “Un-
intended Consequence” of the majors’ decision
to “Buy versus Build”, effectively handing re-
sponsibility for new technology development to
established service companies and technology
entrepreneurs.
The former have strong incentives to in-
crementally improve their ‘cash cows’ and
whilst the latter may have boundless enthusi-
asm, the market may not present an attractive
proposition for their investors.
David Bamford is non-executive director of
Tullow Oil, and a past head of exploration,
West Africa and geophysics with BP
 Dynamic O
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 Contents
Leaders
BP’s Field of the Future
BP has a challenging target to deliver 100 mboed of additional production by applying digital oilfield technology through its Field of the
Future™ programme. Following are the latest developments, challenges faced, lessons learned and future steps. 4
Land seismic with a million channels – HP and Shell
Shell and HP are collaborating to develop a new seismic sensor technology which could make it feasible to do seismic surveys with over a
million channels 7
Exploration
Adrok – find hydrocarbons with dielectric resonance
Adrok Group of Edinburgh, UK, has developed a remarkable technology which can gain an understanding of the subsurface using dielectric
resonance (which roughly means, measuring how different materials respond to radio or microwaves which are passed through them) 8
How good are geologists?
In a test of almost 500 geological interpreters, conducted by the University of Glasgow, only 21 per cent could correctly identify a geological
structure of an inversion from the seismic image 10
$400m for oil and gas technologies
Stavanger based Energy Ventures currently has $400m under management, all invested in upstream oil and gas technology 12
Archiving geoscience data
UK company Enigma Data Solutions (www.enigmadata.com) provides systems to back up geoscience data for 4 out of 5 oil majors – not bad
for a company in business for just 5 years 14
PPDM – developments with data management
How Hess, BP and Total are managing their data – and developments from PPDM to define what a well is – report from PPDM’s first user
conference in London on January 28 16
Finding oil in University archives
As an industry we have focused on the management of in-house and proprietary data. Is this just the tip of the information iceberg? What
about the thousands of other sources of information that are not easily accessible? And assuming we can find all the data sources, are they
of any value? By Robert Winsloe, president, Digital Earth 18
Collaborating to optimise fracturing
Schlumberger brought a project team together at its central London collaborative visualization environment, so they could work together on
finding the best way to optimise a hydraulic fracturing operation in the Southern North Sea. By Jaime Vargas, Schlumberger 20
Production
IT - Fitting the data together
For oil companies to fit together data from different sources across their company, you need a comprehensive 'reference semantic
architecture' to explain how it all should fit. By Mike Brulé, principal of Technomation 23
Gorgon mega project needs “disciplined approach to project management”
The North West Australia Gorgon project is the largest ever natural resource project in Australia, producing 15m tons of LNG annually.
Chevron and its partners are rigorously applying lessons learned from past mega project execution to ensure a predictable project outcome 25
GE Oil & Gas – improving equipment reliability
GE Oil & Gas has a range of initiatives underway to constantly help improve the availability, reliability, and performance of oil and gas
equipment for operators. GE presented some latest developments at its 11th annual meeting held on February 1-2 in Florence, Italy 26
Improving production at BP
Unconventional gas, improving water sweep, reducing deepwater costs and improving recovery – some of the ways where BP anticipates it
can improve production and reduce overall costs, 30
Tessella's software for condition monitoring
R&D IT consultancy Tessella has developed a software solution to enable oil and gas companies set up and deliver their own asset condition
monitoring – and to optimise the use of this equipment by operators 32
Dangers of workflow
As the oil and gas industry rushes to implement ‘workflows’ Dutch Holland advises us of the dangers – including too much focus on the
workflow itself not the desired result; too much detail; not finishing off the job; and scaring people 34
Communications
ERF Wireless –boom in wireless services
ERF Wireless of League City, Texas, has been ranked the 113th fastest growing company in North America on Deloitte’s 2009 Technology Fast
500 list. Its business: supplying wireless communications to oilfields 36
March 2010 - digital energy journal 3
 Leaders

BP’s Field of the Future

BP has a challenging target to deliver 100 mboed of additional production by applying digital oilfield
technology through its Field of the Future™ programme. Following are the latest developments,
challenges faced, lessons learned and future steps.
Written by staff in BP’s Field of the Future team
The initial focus for applying Field of the
Future™ capabilities has been on a group of
assets within the BP portfolio - typically
deepwater fields - that represent a significant
proportion of total production from a com-
paratively small number of high rate wells.
While other assets have not been neglected,
this concentration has been deliberate: tar-
geting parts of the portfolio where the poten-
tial benefits and risk mitigations are sizeable
and clearly defined.
Through 2008 and 2009, BP has con-
tinued to deploy Field of the Future technol-
ogy, building on previous implementations
and targeting the North Sea, deep water Gulf
of Mexico, Azerbaijan, Angola and Indone-
sia.
The benefits of the Field of the Future
programme are becoming increasingly clear.
According to Programme Office Manager
Jeff Dickens, “We estimate that over the past
three years, BP achieved an annual impact Implementing digital oilfield technology through the Field of the Future program at assets like
Thunder Horse are an important part of BP’s goal to deliver 100 mboed of additional
of about 50,000 boed gross, year on year, to
production by 2017
the end of 2009 from our global portfolio.
BP is more than one third of the way to the
target of adding 100,000 barrels of net oil More than 80 percent of BP’s key wells arrays suitable for this type of 4D seismic
equivalent per day by 2017, specifically – about 700 in total – are now benefitting data gathering infrastructure – with the Clair
from the proprietary technologies we are de- from one or more Field of the Future tech- field in the UK being the latest example.
veloping, and we are significantly ahead of nologies. More than two million separate da-
plan.” ta tags help to support production, providing Remote performance management
BP is in the early stages of defining and real time information to operators and moni- A key benefit derived from this communica-
driving the impact of Field of the Future ca- toring the performance of thousands of items tion infrastructure comes from the use of ad-
pabilities on recovery. The required lead of equipment. Some 2,000km of proprietary vanced monitoring systems. In the area of re-
times and reporting sensitivities surrounding fibre-optic cabling has been installed. mote performance management, which in-
quantifying reserves impacts make quantifi- Advanced Collaborative Environments volves gathering, conditioning, analyzing
cation challenging. (ACEs), which enable offshore production and communicating surveillance informa-
Nevertheless, areas of potential impact or drilling facilities to have immediate ac- tion, significant progress has been made in
can be determined readily. For example, im- cess to shore-based specialist support teams the field of subsurface and wells. Remote
proved surveillance data input can contribute via visual, audio and data connections, pro- management has enabled better targeted in-
to better reservoir modeling and improved vide an example of the digital oilfield at terventions, delivering benefits such as in-
depletion plans. New approaches to system work. ACEs facilitate new work processes creased production and lower costs.
optimization can change how wells are op- and change the way in which operations are Integrated Surveillance Information
erated or contribute to the efficiency of de- conducted. System (ISIS) is a BP proprietary technolo-
pletion plan execution, allowing access to Thirty five have been established, and gy that is at the heart of production surveil-
additional resources or protecting existing they have been shown to generate improve- lance. ISIS brings real-time field data to en-
reserves. ments in business performance by helping to gineers sitting in the office, or anywhere else
increase production, lower costs, and sup- in the world. ISIS provides continuous mon-
Implementation examples port safety and operational integrity im- itoring and advanced alert mechanisms, pre-
Examples of recent Field of the Future tech- provements. Connectivity has improved the senting information and analyses that allow
nology implementations can be drawn from quality of decision making and quickened BP engineers to monitor production opera-
each discipline area of the programme. Dig- problem-solving processes. tions remotely in real time and make better
ital infrastructure and IT architecture, which Following the ongoing success of the decisions, faster, to address any problems.
underpin and enable Field of the Future ap- Valhall Life of Field Seismic permanent ar- For example, this capability resulted in
plications, are now well-established. ray, the learnings are being applied to other a 10 mboed (million barrels of oil equivalent

4 digital energy journal - March 2010

 To increase production,
we got more connected.
Maximizing the value of every oil field is critical.
That’s why we’re committed to our Field of the
Future™Program, which relies on real-time data
to automate, innovate and communicate. For
example, a virtual flowmeter at our Thunder
Horse facility is already helping us to deliver an
extra 100mboed of production by 2017. From
faster decision making to remote performance
management, this technology is helping us lower
costs, integrate operations and improve output.
Find out more at bp.com/energymixtechnology

oil natural gas wind solar biofuels efficiency

© 2010 BP Products North America Inc.

 Leaders
per day) benefit for a new field start up in
the Gulf of Mexico through using a virtual
flowmeter to safely operate wells closer to
technical limits than would otherwise have
been possible.
The Data to Desktop (D2D) pro-
gramme is delivering similar capabilities for
effectively managing key pieces of equip-
ment, driving improvements in maintenance
scheduling, for example.
BP has gained significant experience in
its refining business in the use of early warn-
ing systems, using wired and wireless tech-
nology applied to heavy machinery, enabling
more efficient scheduling of maintenance
and resulting in significant reductions in un-
planned maintenance and emergency repairs.
These learnings are being imported into the
upstream business to enhance the remote
performance monitoring effort.
System optimization
System optimization uses modeling and an-
alytical techniques in pursuit of maximum
production and recovery efficiency. A num-
ber of Field of the Future tools and work
processes have been applied.
Real-time data is used to help address
the diverse challenges facing asset operators
as they seek to optimize performance. For
example, models and analytic tools have
been used in several locations to investigate
asset performance and define the correct op-
erating parameters.
Developing an approach to build the
appropriate model quickly and efficiently for
the challenge at hand has been a central part
of this. For example, taking the most appro-
priate action has been an important aspect of
efforts to control ‘slugging’ – the multiphase
flow instabilities found within the subsea
network that create large variations in the
flowrate of liquid, gas and water phases and
can give rise to disruptive pressure surges.
Over the past four years, a number of
complex flow problems have been addressed
by carefully applying a solution most appro-
priate to the problem.
Experience has shown that a ‘one-size-
fits-all’ approach is inappropriate and that a
multi-faceted approach is needed to optimize
processes that experience flow instabilities.
BP has developed a four-tiered approach for
optimizing the process around flow instabil-
ities, involving data analytics, steady-state
modeling, dynamic modeling and process
control.
The BP Slug Controller, an automated
control solution, works by using well per-
formance monitoring data to feed a con-
troller algorithm. This provides real-time
control of choke valves in risers to eliminate
slugging. It has been applied to individual
6 digital energy journal - March 2010
wells prone to slugging behaviour and has
had positive impacts of up to three mboed.
In the Valhall field, in the southernmost
part of the Norwegian sector of the North
Sea, for example, the use of data analytics
and dynamic modeling helped reduce the
number of failed start-up attempts and im-
proved well availability and uptime. Use of
the slug controller eliminated instabilities
and thereby extended the flowing period,
contributing to an increase in production.
A further example of control capability
supporting system optimization is the use of
Down-Hole Flow Control (DHFC), in which
valves are placed in the completion connect-
ed to the surface through hydraulic control
lines. At the surface, hydraulic fluid is
pumped into the lines, causing the valves to
change position. This allows flow or injec-
tion into discrete layers to be controlled re-
motely without intervention in the well.
BP has learned a lot about the applica-
tion of DHFC through its implementations
to date. In particular, DHFC application for
high rate water injector wells has been suc-
cessful. Experience, based on approximately
a dozen applications in two fields, has shown
that DHFC continues to be a viable comple-
tion technology, applicable to a wide range
of multi-layered and multiple pay wells. Its
potential value is huge and BP plan for as-
sets to continue evaluation of DHFC for
high-cost development fields with layered
reservoirs requiring differential injection
control.
The importance of integration
Much of the ultimate potential of the Field
of the Future technology programme lies in
how individual capabilities are brought to-
gether to form a coherent package to help an
asset operate and manage its resources. BP
is now seeing this potential realised in many
locations around the world.
For example, BP’s North Sea business
has employed a number of components,
aligned in support of its strategy and the or-
ganisation to deliver it, and fully embedded
as part of a new office build. In particular,
Advanced Collaborative Environments have
been used successfully to virtually eliminate
the boundaries between offshore and on-
shore teams, resulting in clear recognition of
production, cost and efficiency benefits.
An African deepwater example is an-
other good illustration of an integrated ap-
proach. Here, the high costs of field apprais-
al in the deepwater environment, and the fast
project pace, meant that a relatively low lev-
el of classical field appraisal was carried out.
Innovative subsurface management tech-
niques were used to reduce uncertainty dur-
ing the development phase. Subsea multi-
phase flow metres were used for well test-
ing; downhole flow control was applied for
selective zonal water injection; and exten-
sive use was made of remote sensing tech-
nologies. Real-time data has been relayed
to desktops in-country, in the UK and else-
where, where it has been integrated with well
models to facilitate immediate well and
reservoir management.
This has resulted in production bene-
fits, improved field start-up performance and
better understanding of the reservoir early in
field life, which will help maximise ultimate
field recovery.
Key lessons
This growing body of implementation has
enabled a number of lessons to be learned.
One of the most important of these has
been ensuring there is a clear link between
what the programme provides and the fun-
damental needs and functional priorities of
the business. Such a link ensures there is a
robust basis for engaging the customer ef-
fectively.
Recognising the impact on working
practices is another key area that needs to be
handled effectively. Minimising the change
impact by design, providing appropriate
change management support and leveraging
globally mandated functional processes all
have a role to play. The solutions pursued
must meet a clear business need and be read-
ily supportable and sustainable.
Where next?
Delivering the digital oilfield has been – and
continues to be - a progression from a port-
folio of novel and exciting technologies to a
mature programme capable of addressing
key business problems that supports long-
term strategic and operational goals.
Many of the capabilities offered by the
Field of the Future programme are now con-
sidered business as usual within BP. Others
are rapidly becoming so as they work
through the development cycle. Many of the
uncertainties around defining the digital oil-
field concept and the initial challenges of
practical application have been addressed.
However, there is much still to do. The
delivery of digital oilfield capabilities is an
essential part of the process of continuous
improvement to drive long-term enhanced
performance in production, reliability, effi-
ciency and safety. Making Field of the Fu-
ture work processes ‘the way to operate’ at
BP – not just additional technology to ‘sup-
port how to operate’ – is a goal that will con-
tinue to require effort to develop the people,
process and organizational understanding
needed for sustained success.

Land seismic with a million channels –
HP and Shell
Shell and HP are collaborating to develop a new seismic sensor technology which could make it feasible
to do seismic surveys with over a million channels.
Shell and HP have announced a collaboration
to develop a seismic sensor technology which
could make it feasible to do seismic surveys
with over a million channels, compared to the
tens of thousand channels common in land
surveys today.
The new sensor, developed by HP, has a
moving mass which is part of a tiny silicon
chip (see photograph right). So it can be much
smaller, lighter, more sensitive and with a
lower power consumption than conventional
geophones.
The sensor uses MEMS (micro electro
mechanical system) technology which was
originally developed for the ink jet printer.
Many of us have ink jet printers in our
homes and we know that the cartridges can
get very expensive. What you might not know
is that the cartridge has a tiny machine in it
which vaporises a thin layer of ink that acts
like a piston which ejects a droplets of ink on-
to your paper at 15 metres per second.
This capability to develop these tiny ma-
chines, developed by HP Labs working to-
gether with HP’s Imaging and Printing group,
has been adapted to create the tiny sensor. HP
Labs has been working on MEMS technolo-
gy for 25 years, and has been working on new
sensors for the past 5 years.
HP and Shell did not reveal the specific
terms of the deal, but it does not seem likely
that the technology will be available to the
general industry, at least not initially. The
MEMS technology is proprietary to HP.
Wim Walk, manager of Novel Geo-
physics Measurements with Shell, suggests
that Shell might like to use the technology just
for itself for a few years before making it
available to the industry, probably through
one of the existing seismic technology ven-
dors.
Tiny - the new HP sensor to be used by Shell in
seismic surveys
Leaders
HP's tech-
nology was first
recognized as a
potential break-
through innova-
tion for seismic
applications by
Dirk Smit, now
Shell's Vice
President for
Inside the sensor - a moving mass is part of a tiny silicon chip
Exploration
Technology,
when visiting a Shell nanotechnology confer- If the overall seismic survey can be done
ence for academics and industry specialists in faster, then it can be done at lower cost, which
2008, Mr Walk says. makes it plausible to commission more seis-
HP is now working to customize the sen- mic surveys. If the survey can be made with a
sor for seismic surveys, based on Shell’s re- higher channel count, then it could provide
quirements. much higher resolution seismic images.
The technology draws on other areas of All of this leads to the ability to find and
expertise at HP, such as battery technology, image reservoirs with more accuracy, and find
wireless communications and the ability to more oil with less drilling risk.
store and manage large volumes of data. There are also environmental benefits to
HP envisages that the sensor could be the technology, Mr Walk says. Because the
used for many applications other than seis- sensors are wireless, there are no cables,
mic, including bridge and infrastructure which need to be laid very carefully to ensure
health monitoring, mine exploration and they don’t cause safety hazards or environ-
earthquake monitoring. mental damage. Also, with less equipment to
The sensor is 1,000 times more sensitive transport, there are much fewer truck move-
than other “high volume” products on the ments required.
market, HP says, and can offer a broader fre- Current seismic surveys can use 500
quency bandwidth. tonnes of equipment and need some 200 peo-
ple to deploy, Mr Walk says.
Better seismic surveys To do a bigger survey than that with ex-
The biggest impact the sensor will have, Shell isting technology, “you can’t just multiply
anticipates, is to make it cost effective to do that by 10,” he says – ie it isn’t really feasible
seismic surveys with a much higher channel to do a survey with 5,000 tonnes of equipment
count (ie with a great deal more recording and as many as 2,000 people. You need to
points), perhaps over a million channels, says look for better ways of doing it.
Shell’s Mr Walk. Although it has not yet undertaken any
With one channel per sensor, and the surveys with the technology, Shell has already
sensor being wireless this would allow a vari- done a lot of modelling as to how it could be
ety of topologies from a density of one sensor done, with different topologies (structures for
every 10 metres on a 10km by 10km (possi- laying out the sensors and recording seismic
bly rolling) grid to a survey over a much larg- in different directions).
er area with sensors laid less densely. “We think this will represent a leap for-
Because the sensors are much lighter ward in seismic data quality that will provide
than conventional recording systems, have no Shell with a competitive advantage in explor-
cables and use less battery power, they can be ing difficult oil and gas reservoirs, such as
deployed much more quickly, there is less sub-salt plays in the Middle East or uncon-
weight to move around, less personnel are ventional gas in North America,” said Gerald
needed to do a survey, and ensuring the bat- Schotman, executive vice president, Innova-
teries are fully charged is not so much trou- tion/Research and Development, Shell.
ble.
March 2010 - digital energy journal 7
 Exploration
Adrok – find hydrocarbons with
dielectric resonance
Adrok Group of Edinburgh, UK, has developed a remarkable technology which can gain an understanding
of the subsurface using dielectric resonance (which roughly means, measuring how different materials
respond to radio or microwaves which are passed through them).
www.adrok.com
The technology has already been used by
BG Group, Caithness Petroleum and Medco
Energy. BG is not revealing where in the
world it has used the technology, but was
pleased enough with it to consider taking it
to another part of the world, says Gordon
Stove, managing director of Adrok.
Adrok has already tested the equip-
ment in volcanic regions in Scotland, in the
deepest onshore site in Scotland, in deserts
in Oman, in the Canadian Arctic circle, and
offshore. It has collected data from rock as
deep as 4km, and tested its results against
what is known to be underground at that
depth from boreholes.
The technology works by learning how
different substances - including hydrocar-
bons – interact with the light waves which
pass through them (and are then reflected
back to the surface) . After ‘training’ the tool
in areas where you know what the geology
is (working out how different types of rock
interact with the wave), you can then use it
to understand unknown rocks.
Adrok is not the only company work-
ing with dielectric resonance – also HP,
MIT, NASA, Imperial College, Demontfort
University are conducting laboratory exper-
iments, Mr Stove said.
Robert Kennedy, CEO of Caithness Pe-
troleum Ltd, in a comment from the audi-
ence at the Finding Petroleum Exploration
Technology and Business conference in
London on Jan 20-21, said his company had
used the technology successfully in Moroc-
co. “Once you teach the equipment what a
gas field is – it can actually find a gas field,”
he said. “I’m working on plans to cash in
while the going is good.”
The system identifies molecules but
cannot identify how much of a certain sub-
stance is present, “so a small amount of gas
can be confused with a large gas field,” Mr
Kennedy said. “That’s a problem we had ini-
tially which I think we’ve largely over-
come.”
Caithness Petroleum asked Adrok to do
a test on a known region and identify where
it thought there would be oil and gas – the
results were than compared to actual known
oil and gas reservoirs. “We proved we could
8 digital energy journal - March 2010
find gas in the ground very accurately,” Mr
Stove said.
The gas reservoirs were at depths of
750m – Mr Stove reckons that his technolo-
gy predicted their locations to within 7m.
“The client was very happy,” he said. “He
concluded that the technique had success-
fully predicted where the gas was.”
“I’ll give you a simple test,” said An-
drew Lodge, exploration director of Premier
Oil, in the audience of the Finding Petrole-
um conference. “I’ve got 3 km of overbur-
den that I know roughly what the rocks are,
but not absolutely. Can you tell me if I’ve
got hydrocarbons [beneath them]?”
“Yes”, Mr Stove said.
The company was founded in 2000,
and spent 8 years developing the technolo-
gy, including developing the theory and
building prototypes. Around £3m was in-
vested over this time, mainly from manage-
ment but with some government funding. It
was commercially launched in mid 2008. A new way to finding hydrocarbons using
The system was developed by Dr Col- dielectric resonance - Gordon Stove,
managing director of Adrok
in Stove (Gordon Stove’s father), who
worked as a principal investigator for the
European Space Agency and NASA, and in-
vented principles of atomic dielectric reso-
nance. ceived signal).
The equipment all fits in about 7 small
The system cases – so it can be carried with personnel
In more detail, the equipment sends a nar- on an aeroplane as excess baggage, which
row beam of energy into the ground – like a saves time and hassle, Mr Stove says.
laser pointer – which is reflected back by
the various rock layers, with the energy Calibration
changed by the materials it has passed The biggest challenge to begin with was cal-
through on the way. It can reach a depth of ibration – in order to understand the data
4km. The microwave does not need to go di- gathered in the field, it is first necessary to
rectly into the ground – it can go in at an- know which types of rocks which give off
gles. which kinds of signatures.
The system measures the resonance of The ideal situation is if there are out-
the rock (how it oscillates at different radio crops of the rock under question, so direct
wave frequencies) and how much the rock tests can be made on it.
reflects the light wave. However Adrok has been gradually
Once the system has been trained, it building up a database of different rock sig-
gives absolute answers – so is not subject to natures, and believes it is close to the point
the vagaries of interpreting, where different where the company can do a survey of rock
geologists can give a different result. it knows absolutely nothing about before-
The equipment comprises two anten- hand and come up with useful results.
nas (for transmitting and receiving), and two Adrok has been testing as many differ-
boxes of electronics (one to manage the cre- ent rock types as possible, including going
ation of the wave, one to analyse the re- through core stores, and also drilling rocks.
 Exploration
Doing a survey ity.
If it is asked to do a survey for a client, The data
Adrok can start off by making an assessment can also be im-
about whether it thinks the technology will ported into
actually work on that geology. “If we don’t earth model
pass this stage we don’t go any further – databases, in-
we’re open and honest with our clients – we cluding Petrel,
stop there,” he said. Petris and
If a decision is made to go to the next Kingdom.
stage, Adrok will then try to get as many op- Mr Stove
portunities as possible to ‘train’ the equip- reckons that
ment on known rocks which are similar to the system
the rocks in that location. could prove
All of the equipment needed to do a most useful in
survey can be driven to the site on a Land ‘appraisal’
Rover. A strip of land about 100m long is stage – getting
needed to do the survey. an alternative The Adrok field technology to take surveys - small enough to take on an
Individual surveys of a specific site view of what aeroplane as excess baggage and fit in a landrover
take about 2 hours, so it is possible to do 5 is happening in
surveys in a day. Then it takes about 3 days the subsurface – to give oil companies addi- waves are already used for telescopes, send-
to process the data. tional information before they make a deci- ing waves from the ground to the moon – so
The scans can either be directly down- sion to start drilling. there are no obstacles to sending them
wards (to find out about rock beneath the through the air or space.
scanner, similar to if you actually drilled a Future developments
well downwards, or you can do a wide an- In future, Adrok would like to be able to pin-
gle scan of a wider area. point rock properties more precisely, and Download presentations
The output data is quite simple – Adrok work out properties such as density and Download Gordon Stove's presentation at
believes that there are hydrocarbons at a cer- moisture content. www.findingpetroleum.com/fil
tain location, and at a certain depth. It pro- It is also considering developing an air- es/etb1/adrok.pdf
vides a deterministic answer, not a probabil- borne version of the technology. Radio

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 Exploration
How good are geologists?
In a test of almost 500 geological interpreters, conducted by the University of Glasgow, only 21 per cent
could correctly identify a geological structure of an inversion from the seismic image, said Dr Alan Gibbs,
director of Glasgow based Midland Valley Exploration, speaking at the Jan 20-21 Exploration, Technology
and Business conference in London.
With the help of post-doctorate researcher Dr
Clare Bond, Midland Valley created a geolog-
ical structure on a computer, then asked GX
Technology, a seismic company to show what
the seismic data would look like if rock with
that geology was surveyed (synthetic seismic).
It then put the seismic in front of 500 profes-
sional geoscientists and asked them to inter-
pret it.
Only 21 per cent got the correct answer
– inversion. Other geoscientists gave a wide
range of different responses, including a thrust
(26 per cent), salt / mud diapirism (8 per cent),
extension (6 per cent). This could indicate that
in the real world, geologists are correct only
21 per cent of the time.
35 per cent of respondents considering
themselves “experts” got the right answer – so
many experts got the answer wrong, and many
non experts got it right.
Midland Valley then analysed the meth-
ods used – and discovered that the more dif-
ferent techniques that had been used to try to
answer the question, the more likely they were
to get the right answer.
In fact, every respondent who used 5 or
more techniques got the correct answer, such
as drawing horizons, drawing sticks, looking
for features, putting in annotation, descriptive
writing or trying to work out how the rock
ended up as it was (evolutionary thought).
And of these methods, the most success-
ful one was evolutionary thought (94 per cent
of people using evolutionary thought got the
correct answer). This compares to 45 per cent
who drew horizons, and 10 per cent who drew
sticks. The numbers were similar for both peo-
ple who considered themselves “experts” and
“non experts” – suggesting that people’s ef-
fectiveness depends on their technique, not
whether or not they consider themselves to be
an ‘expert’.
“You don’t need software – you just need
to think about it,” he said. “Everybody can be
more effective.”
Readers who are concerned that geolo-
gists might only be accurate 21 per cent of the
time can take comfort from similar studies of
doctors, showing that doctors are about the
same amount of the time, he said.
And when people are correct, it is surely
often more because of luck than expertise.
Midland Valley operates as something of
10 digital energy journal - March 2010
a geological troubleshooter, being called into
companies who have discovered that the rock
they are drilling through is very different to
what they expected from their models.
Evolutionary thinking
Evolutionary thinking is about trying to work
out how the rock below the surface became
the way it is now. Pieces of rock which can be
hundreds of millions of years old have been
moved, by tectonic forces, into their present
day shape and position.
If it not always clear how the subsurface
reached the shape it is today in a model. This
lack of understanding could indicate a serious
problem in your model – and if you can un-
derstand how all the pieces got to their present
condition, a large amount of uncertainty has
been removed.
Working out how the rock evolved to
(what you think is) its current structure can be
done in your head, or by cutting up paper, or
(more commonly today) using 3D computer
models.
Work process
In many ways modern work processes do not
support the types of geological working which
are most likely to bring the right results, he
said. Geologists are also not encouraged to
carefully work out different scenarios, just to
“stick it on your PowerPoint and drill it,” he
said.
“Every model is incorrect – the question
is just at what level they are incorrect”? he
said.
A better working environment would in-
volve more peer review and peer challenge –
with more people looking at the same data,
coming from different approaches, and dis-
cussing their ideas.
Many oil companies have implemented
robust processes to make sure every model is
fully assessed before decisions are made with
it. But they might be better off putting their ef-
forts into nurturing a work environment where
people are creative and take an interest in each
others’ work, so that each model is looked at
in a number of different ways.
This is how things used to be like, he
said. “When I first joined the oil industry, the
industry had large teams of people – and most
companies had big internal training programs.
“Every model is incorrect – the question is just
at what level they are incorrect?” - Dr Alan
Gibbs, director of Glasgow based Midland
Valley Exploration
“But over the last few years it has tipped
downwards. We have been forced in most
companies to cut down the number of people
who are around. So the amount of time for
mentoring people, peer review and peer de-
bate has reduced.”
“We also have people working on com-
puters almost entirely. Computers are very
powerful but the ‘Nintendo generation’ tend
to believe what they see on computer.”
Universities are also rewarded by the re-
search they do on what is new and exciting –
not by how well they teach people fundamen-
tal geological skills, he said.
Even if someone has good academic ge-
ological qualifications, they might not neces-
sary have good core geological skills, if they
have been mainly working on specific proj-
ects for their research, he said.
And of course motivation is important.
“Motivating people so they come to work en-
thusiastic and work as a team is actually diffi-
cult,” he said. [A good working environment
is when] people chat to each other on a team
basis. People have the flexibility to be cre-
ative. When someone’s up against a time dead-
line the rest of the team help that person – a
whole pile of stuff – it’s very very difficult and
I’m sure the bigger your organisation the more
difficult it gets,” he said.
You can download Dr Gibbs presentation:
www.findingpetroleum.com/fil
es/etb1/midland.pdf
 Exploration
$400m for oil and gas technologies
Stavanger based Energy Ventures currently has $400m under management, all invested in upstream oil
and gas technology.
Energy Ventures, a venture capital firm that Mr Herrera believes that Energy Ven-
invests in technologies for the upstream oil tures should be a great resource for compa-
and gas market, reports that it currently has nies ready to commercialize their technolo-
$400 million USD under management, said gy, with its experience assisting companies
Greg Herrera, partner and head of the com- get from early stage technology concepts to
pany’s Aberdeen business, speaking at the commercially robust solutions which the in-
London Finding Petroleum Exploration dustry can use with confidence.
Technology and Business conference (Lon- The goal is to invest in companies that
don, Jan 20-21). have a proprietary technology that can scale
During 2009, the firm sold its portfolio on a global basis and has the attributes to en-
company Direct Drive Systems to FMC able an IPO, he said.
Technologies in a transaction valued at $120 However many of the companies are
million. It also sold Novadrill and also in- purchased by service companies instead of
vested in a new company, Reality Mobile. going for an IPO. To date, of the 8 compa-
The partners in the fund come from a nies Energy Ventures has exited, one has had
broad range of upstream oil and gas techni- an IPO and the other 7 were purchased by
cal engineering and geoscience disclipines, strategic trade buyers, he said.
which gives them a good idea of which tech- One problem is that E&P companies of-
nologies can provide the most value to the ten prefer to only deal directly with larger
industry, he said. companies rather than smaller ones.
The company has a strong belief in the “The challenge for us is to overcome
contribution technology can make to ensur- these objections,” he said.
ing that consumers have the energy they Mr Herrera believes that the best way
need over coming decades, he said. to successfully roll out a new technology to
The main criteria for investment is in the market is to try to and identify a product
companies that can substantially help oil and champion within an operator.
gas companies reduce the risks associated We need someone “who can ‘see’ the
with exploration and the costs of develop- value, and is willing to sponsor new technol-
ment through the smart application of pro- ogy adoption,” he said. “Energy Ventures has
prietary technology, he said. The firm typi- developed a network of such contacts who
cally invests between £3m and £15m in tech- can be key influencers in helping persuade
nology led companies. the company to adopt a new technology as
part of the work
program they
are involved
with.”
The finan-
cial meltdown
in 2008/2009
caused many
oil and gas
companies to
hold back on
spending and,
as a result, they
have become a
bit slower to
adopt new in-
novations.
“Over the
last 18 months
it’s been incred-
ibly difficult to
get operators to
An Energy Ventures investment: Stringray Geophysical does permanent fibre introduce new
optic reservoir monitoring technology to
12 digital energy journal - March 2010
their compa-
nies,” he said.
“These days,
companies are
less willing to
take risks with
technology.”
Energy
Ventures’
funding
comes from
several cur-
rent investors
including $400m invested in upstream
Ferd, oil and gas technologies –
Greg Herrera, partner and
Temasek
head of Aberdeen business,
Holdings, Energy Ventures
LGT Capital
Partners,
Gjensidige,
KLP, DnB NOR/Vital, Argentum, IKM
Group, Storebrand, Jebsen, Umoe, Klave-
ness and Hoegh.
At the January Finding Petroleum Con-
ference, Mr. Herrera reviewed a number of
current Energy Ventures investments of par-
ticular interest to the oil and gas exploration
arena.
PanGeo SubSea
PanGeo SubSea, based in St John’s New-
foundland, develops underwater acoustic
technology which can be used to identifying
geohazards, such as boulders, hydrates, gas
accumulations, faults and soft sediments, be-
fore major seabed construction and installa-
tion projects.
The company makes the Sub-Bottom
Imager (SBI) for tracking pipelines. It can
deliver high-resolution images up to 5m
deep, with real-time data processing/imag-
ing.
Ingrain
Ingrain, based in Houston, USA, has tech-
nology for measuring precise physical prop-
erties of reservoir rocks from cores, plugs
and drill cuttings through proprietary and
patented computational methods.
“The ultimate dream is to have the abil-
ity to determine real time permeability and
porosity from drill cuttings, and Ingrain is a
perfect example of a company that is on the
forefront of turning this possibility into a re-
ality,” he said.
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 Exploration
Stingray Geophysical
Stingray Geophysical provides fibre-optic
seismic permanent reservoir monitoring,
which generate useful data for reservoir man-
agement.
Fotech Solutions
Fotech Solutions has developed an optical
acoustic based fibre-based monitoring sys-
tem called Helios, which enables detection
of multiple events taking place along the fi-
bre cable.
By installing fibre-optic cables perma-
nently into a well, data is generated that can
then be used to determine a well’s activity
and ultimately provide for better recovery
and lower operational costs.
The data can be used to spot leaks and
monitor flow from different zones in real
time. Up to 40km of cable can be installed,
with data gathered with a 1m accuracy along
the cable. To date, the system has been in-
stalled on 15 wells.
Some of the projects so far demonstrat-
ed that production is coming from different
parts of the reservoir to what was thought, he
said. This new information created an oppor-
tunity to optimise production.
Fotech’s CEO is Doug Gibson, who was
previously CEO of Vibtech, a company that
developed seismic testing technology and
was acquired by Sercel in 2006 for £32m.
Ziebel
Norwegian company Ziebel has developed a
carbon rod which can be pushed into wells
to do well interventions.
This method is much smaller, light-
weight and cheaper solution than coiled tub-
ing. Advantages to using this technology in-
clude distributed real-time sensing, more ef-
ficient logging, less operational manpower
and mitigated risk.
The technology is called Ziplog.
The company has also developed a
technology called “Maglev,” which uses per-
manent magnet motor technology to pump
water out of a gas well.

Archiving geoscience data

UK company Enigma Data Solutions (www.enigmadata.com) provides systems to back up geoscience
data for 4 out of 5 oil majors – not bad for a company in business for just 5 years.

Enigma Data Solutions of East Sussex, UK
and Houston, USA, has business with 4 out
of 5 oil majors– helping them to archive their
geoscience data for the long term.
The company implements software
which runs behind standard geoscience soft-
ware, and takes a periodic copy of all proj-
ect data. The copy is then kept as long as it
is deemed valuable.
The aim is to capture all of the impor-
tant data which someone is working on for a
specific project, so it can be easily found at
a later stage.
The company claims that it does not
have any big competitors – apart from in-
house solutions or when people don’t
archive their data at all.
The data is archived according to the
user’s perspective – for example, if the user
is working on a reservoir model using five
files of source data and the reservoir model
file, then those 6 files are archived.
There is an important differentiation
between an archive and an IT back-up, says
Peter Copley, managing director. A back-up
is making a temporary copy of your data in
case your hard drive crashes overnight. An
archive is keeping a permanent copy of your
most important data, in case you need to re-
trieve it in future – for example, if you need
the files which led to the reservoir model you
are currently working on, or you want to go
back and work on source data with a differ-
ent processing method.
Many users are capable of archiving
their data themselves, but, as we all know,
many forget, or don’t bother. This process process
takes the task out of their hands but ensures consistent,
that the data is backed up consistently ac- Mr Copley
cording to data management guidelines. says.
The user does not normally need to be Al-
aware that the process is going on. Enigma though
has written software integrations with the most of
most popular geoscience software, so it can Enigma’s
work out which the project files are and au- clients use
tomatically make a copy of them and put it it for geo-
on a storage medium. science data
Integrations have already been written “We have
with Landmark software, Schlumberger’s implement-
Petrel and Geoframe, and SMT’s Kingdom. ed it in oth-
It can also archive word documents, spread- er industry
sheets and PowerPoint. sectors such
Most, if not all, software applications as aero en- Important differentiation
store their files in a database in a specific lo- gineering between an archive and an IT
cation on a PC or network drive, and have and semi back-up - Peter Copley,
another place with information about where conduc- managing director, Enigma
all the relevant files are stored, so the Enig- tors.” Data Solutions
ma software can easily work out what to A typi-
archive. cal mid-
With very little user training involved, sized oil company could generate a terabyte
implementations can be made very quickly. a month of data to be backed up – which is
For example one recent implementation for easily manageable with today’s data storage
a medium sized oil company employing 60 costs. It normally includes large files of stat-
geoscientists, working on 100 projects in 3 ic raw data, and small files showing the dif-
locations, took 15 days, Mr Copley says. The ferent stages of interpretation.
company was using Landmark, SMT, Petrel, The data is normally stored twice in
ESRI and Geoframe. different places – specialist data archive
The software is available with a web in- services can be used if necessary to store off
terface, so users can manually capture proj- site secondary copies..
ect data via their corporate intranet using a Enigma has been in business since
web browser, but it is probably better if it is 2005, but the technology development start-
done automatically, to keep the archiving ed in the mid 1990s, Mr Copley says.

14 digital energy journal - March 2010

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Increasing query rates for the right data and information at the critical time continue to provide challenges
to the E&P industry. With all the changes in tools, data, people, processes, the dilemma of “Your Data’s
Here Somewhere” is frontline to efficiencies and success, while preventing costly mistakes and failure. Data
integration of all those silos within the enterprise is still a daunting problem - yet is low hanging fruit that
will continue to greatly improve efficiencies in the E&P enterprise.

Many approaches can meet the data challenge, and while no one approach is the “magic” way, attendees to
this conference will hear real-world best practices and implementations from those companies leading the
efforts to knock down data and information management barriers that confront our industry – seismic, G&G,
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 Exploration
PPDM – developments with data
management
How Hess, BP and Total are managing their data – and developments from PPDM to define what a well is
– report from PPDM’s first user conference in London on January 28.
Fred Kunzinger, manager of global data man-
agement with Hess, and a board director of
PPDM, spoke about Hess’s work to develop
master data management models, starting
with its well and interpretation data, speak-
ing at PPDM’s first London meeting in Janu-
ary 28.
People have been saying for many years
that they would like to have standard process-
es, practises and technologies, and credible
data, across the company, but until now no-
one had ever agreed the funding to arrange
it, he said.
“I did a presentation to senior manage-
ment and said, ‘we have 4 well log databas-
es,’” Mr Kunzinger recalls. “People said
‘how come.’ I said because every year I put
$500,000 in the budget to put the the data-
bases together and you keep throwing it out
of the budget.”
“Then the senior VP of exploration said,
we spend $2m logging one well, how come
we can’t spend £500k to manage the data we
create?”
“People realised –they make every busi-
ness decision based on data they don’t care
about,” he says.
This led to a project to start improving
data management at Hess.
The whole company is gradually start-
ing to buy-in to the project – starting with
senior management, then bringing in mid lev-
el management and finally end users, he says.
A few years ago, the company’s offices
in London and Houston had such different
processes, “they could have been like BP and
Shell,” he says. “We realised, we’re never go-
ing to act as a global company until we put it
all together.”
The company calculated the total years
of petrotechnical experience held by its staff,
and how many of those years of experience
were held by people who were eligible to re-
tire in 5 years. The answer: 80 per cent of it.
Meanwhile 30 per cent of employees
have under 5 years of experience in the oil
and gas industry, and over 55 per cent of the
workforce have under 5 years at Hess.
The company brought in Houston based
information management consultancy Noah
Consulting, which works mainly in the up-
stream oil and gas industry, to implement the
plan. Noah Consulting did data mapping, put
16 digital energy journal - March 2010
together the technical architecture, worked
out the data governance system, designed the
meta data, and managed the overall project.
The main plan is to have a data reposi-
tory with additional validation, he said. So
instead of having (say) 8 different well logs
available on a network drive for a certain
well, there would only be one well log in the
master database.
The company originally tried to use an
off the shelf solution for a master database.
“We spent 14 months trying to make a com-
mercial solution work, but it didn’t fit what
we wanted to do,” he said. “So we developed
our own solution with PPDM.”
If the company’s data is not sorted, then
any information and knowledge taken from
it is suspect, he says.
Hess’ solution was to develop what it
calls ‘a Technically Validated Database’ for
all well and interpretation data, as the author-
itative source – and has a specific system of
when data is added, who adds it, and who ap-
proves the data as “technically validated”, in
a flow chart.
The initiative was promoted internally
as a way to ensure people can find the good
stuff easily, not to improve data quality, to
emphasise the benefit of the system to indi-
vidual users, he said.
To ensure that the data will still be us-
able in 10 years, the company specified that
all the data must be stored in open formats.
The next stage of the project will be to
add seismic data, he said.
The database can also keep controls of
changes to the master data. There are many
instances of changes being made over the
years (for example someone changing the lo-
cation of a well) without keeping a record of
it, which caused problems further along.
Since starting the initiative, other de-
partments in the company have started using
the term ‘technically validated database’ for
their own attempts at establishing a master
data store, but perhaps without such strict
controls on the data – that everything must
be validated and there can only be one copy
of each file (log etc) in it.
One senior manager at Hess told Mr
Kunzinger that he found the database a good
way to assess people. “I will see how much
stuff people load onto the TVDB every year
to see how good they are,” he told Mr Kun-
zinger.
There are still staff members who are
resisting the project – Mr Kunzinger said he
would like them to sign a disclaimer saying
that they won’t complain if they can’t find
the data they are looking for.
Shannon Tassin, director of Noah Con-
sulting, which managed the project, says that
there is an important differentiation to be
made between archiving the data and ‘pro-
moting’ it into the TVDB. “This is just the
best stuff,” he says.
The company used software from
Volant Solutions (www.volantsolu-
tions.com), which has already written in-
terfaces to software products such as Schlum-
berger’s GeoFrame reservoir characterisation
system. This means that data can easily be
explorted from GeoFrame into the TVDB.
Hess employs around 300 geoscientists,
of which about 200 of them are using the sys-
tem.
BP
BP spends a “multiple of” billion dollars
every year on data acquisition, if you include
seismic data, logging, reservoir data, MWD
/ LWD, engineering data, plant and equip-
ment, said Gavin Goodland, head of E&P da-
ta management with BP, speaking at the
PPDM conference in London on January
28th.
“The company owns an enormous in-
formational asset,” he said.
The company aims to standardise its
data management across the whole company
internationally. It also assesses all data in
terms of the amount of money which is spent
on acquiring and managing it, and what it
gets from the data.
One big question within BP was
whether data management was a task of the
IT department or business management. “We
wasted a lot of time trying to decide. The an-
swer is that it’s actually both. It’s still evolv-
ing,” he said.
The company sets up data governance
boards, with representation from different
parts of the company, including from the
technical discipline leaders (such as subsur-
face and wells), end users (e.g. geoscien-
tists), and from the IT department.

Mr Goodland has a theory that cen-
tralised data management, or leaving data
management up to different business units,
can both end up with good results – but the
worst thing is something in between a ‘wishy
washy’ attempt to implement standard data
management which does not have full gov-
ernance.
BP has spent a lot of time analysing the
various data standards relevant to the oil and
gas industry, how mature they are, which ar-
eas they mainly cover, and which ones it
wants to get involved with.
The company decided it wants to get
involved with Energistics, PPDM, and the
POSC Caesar 15926 standard “Integration
of life-cycle data for process plants includ-
ing oil and gas production facilities”.
“We want to help Trudy and board
work out the focus areas of PPDM – and
don’t want them overlapping with Energis-
tics,” he said.
TOTAL
Dr Claude Martin of Total talked about the
company’s “Geosciences Affiliate DAta
MAnagement” project or GADAMA, which
aims to have a common policies, data mod-
els and workflow across the company, with
professional data management.
Total has 3,000 pages of corporate best
practises showing how data should be man-
aged, to ensure quality, completeness and
long term preservation.
Most of its databases use Schlumberg-
er software, including AVOCET for produc-
tion data, FINDER for geological and geo-
physical data, eSearch for physical asset da-
ta, reports and maps, and LogDB for logs.
Separately, it has a project database,
with software including Petrel, Geoframe
and Eclipse.
In future the company is likely to move
from Schlumberger’s Finder data manage-
ment system to its Seabed E&P data model,
he said.
One criticism of Schlumberger is that,
“even if the software pieces are all Schlum-
berger it’s not so easy to integrate the
pieces,” he said. “We had to fight with
Schlumberger in order to do so. But I think
they learned a lot, it was win win win.”
The company started a data quality
project in 2000 covering Indonesia, Nigeria
and Angola; in 2008-2009 it added UK ,
Netherlands, Congo, Emirates, Canada and
Libya. Also in 2009 it upgraded the Nigeria
and Angola data systems. In 2010 it plans to
upgrade Indonesia, and add a system for
Norway. Altogether the data project covers
85 per cent of Total’s overall production, he
said.
Before the GADAMA project with im-
plemented, Total calculated that geoscien-
tists spent 33 per cent of their time either
finding, accessing, cleaning up or manipu-
lating data before they could start work on
it. After implementing the project it believes
that the average study preparation time is be-
ing reduced by 60 per cent.
Dr Martin is proud of the fact that in In-
donesia, the company grew its petrotechni-
cal team by 270 per cent between 2000 and
2005, but its data management staff only
needed to increase by 60 per cent.
The critical thing is to get data right at
the point when it is being entered. It is much
easier for the person creating the data to
make sure that it is clean, rather than anyone
else. “All data has a father or a mother,” he
says. “But if its 20 years old, nobody wants
to do anything with it.”
“We’ve been in Nigeria for 40 years,
there’s a lot of data. We have at least 30 or
40,000 wells around the world in our data-
base.”
To enter the main data types for a well
–eg headers, directional survey, logs, cores,
sidewall cores, checkshot, core analysis –
takes 3 man days, he said. So to enter 1,000
wells takes around 3,000 man days.
What is a well?
One recent project PPDM has been engaged
in is defining standard definitions for the oil-
field, including definitions for the important
components of wells. Nine terms have been
defined, including Well Set, Well, Well Ori-
gin, Wellbore, Wellbore Segment, Wellbore
Completion, Wellbore Contact Interval,
Wellhead Stream and Well Reporting
Stream, said Trudy Curtis, CEO of PPDM.
Each of these terms has been further illus-
trated and described in the context of sever-
al typical well configurations.
The aim is to resolve problems when
people from different parts of the company,
from different companies or from different
regions describe the same “well” in different
ways. For example, users of financial, pro-
duction, drilling, interpretation and contract
management systems all describe “wells”
differently. Some systems will identify each
wellbore, others individual completed inter-
vals, others tubing strings while still others
may only identify the origin of the well.
For example, imagine a normal vertical
well which was producing for 20 years until
it ended up producing more water than oil,
at which time the original completion was
plugged and the wellbore deepened into an-
other part of the reservoir. Some people
would feel that there is only one well bore,
going from the bottom of the second event
to the surface. Others will recognize the orig-
inal wellbore and the deepened wellbore sep-
March 2010 - digital energy journal
Exploration
Developing standard definitions for well
components - Trudy Curtis, CEO, PPDM
arately.
Data management issues can arise
when well logs, costs, regulatory filings and
so forth need to be attached to the correct
component of the well set. “If you attach
a log file to the wrong well, bad things can
happen,” says Ms Curtis.
PPDM has a standard definition of a
wellbore being “a path of drilled footage,
from the well origin to a terminating point”.
It also says that each well origin (ie well
head) only has one well connected to it. So
the system is one well but with two well-
bores. You can read more of PPDM’s stan-
dard definitions and explanations on its web-
site www.whatisawell.org.
Another potential area of confusion is
if production from different completions is
added together to give a value of total pro-
duction for the well; and later on engineers
make the mistake of thinking that all of the
production can be allocated to a single com-
pletion.
A typical problem oil companies have
is that different departments all maintain dif-
ferent databases – the asset team, drilling de-
partment, reserves management, land man-
agement, geology, accounting departments –
and they all have different well identifica-
tion systems, or all see a well in different
ways.
This means that to answer a simple
question like “what is my production,” it is
necessary to bring data from lots of different
databases.
Having clear industry wide definitions
also makes it easier for oil companies to do
business with each other (e.g. selling shares
in an asset). “If you purchase an asset,
wouldn’t you like to know what they mean
when they talk about their “well” data?” says
Ms Curtis.
17
 Exploration
Information Junction
Matthew West from oil and gas data consul-
tancy Information Junction (who spent 25
years at Shell in Information Management),
believes that there is no intrinsic difference
between the quality of data (in databases) and
the quality of information (in documents).
They are all there to help people make deci-
sions, he said, speaking at the PPDM Lon-
don conference on Jan 28th.
When you calculate the total cost of put-
ting together an information system, you can
typically find that the data costs 50 per cent
of the total costs; training costs 20 per cent
and the software, hardware and systems inte-
gration cost 10 per cent each, he said.
With the cost of data so enormous, any-
thing which can help reduce the cost of cre-
ating good data is probably worth doing, he
said. “There is no great challenge to informa-
tion quality – it is about attention to detail
and getting it right first time.”
This is a concept many people don’t
seem to understand. “People would rather
have armies of accountants reconciling bad
Finding oil in university archives
As an industry we have focused on the management of in-house and proprietary data. Is this just the tip
of the information iceberg? What about the thousands of other sources of information that are not easily
accessible? And assuming we can find all the data sources, are they of any value?
By Robert Winsloe, president, Digital Earth
There is a vast amount of useful exploration
data all over the world, stored in university
archives, attics, computer systems, and peo-
ple’s heads.
Of course the value of (and the need
for) external data sources varies through the
oil field life cycle. In new ventures for ex-
ample, as we screen thousands of opportuni-
ties looking for the one or two that best
match our investment criteria, we rely heav-
ily on external data sources and external ex-
pertise. And at each major decision point
through the life cycle we again look for the
information and experience that will enable
us to optimise performance and maximise
profits.
The larger external data providers such
as IHS, Woodmac, Fugro, TGS-Nopec are
well known to us. And there are many medi-
um sized data companies who fill a niche
such as C&C Reservoirs’ field analogues
database. But below this there are literally
thousands of smaller obscure data providers,
from geologists with data stashed away in
their garage to university archives in devel-
oping countries and of course the largely un-
indexed knowledge held by hundreds of
18 digital energy journal - March 2010
data, than get it right in the first place,” he takes many years, and he put together a ma-
said. “You can test an organisation by asking turity plan which shows different stages of
them how many accountants they have.” data management – which he called initial,
The important properties of information recognising, specifying, managing and opti-
are relevance (so you need to know how it is mising. See slide 17 on
going to be used); clarity; accessibility / se- www.ppdm.org/download.php?id=1
curity; consistency (is the same data gathered 539
from different sources the same?); prove- “10 years to get from top to bottom
nance (records of where it came from); if it [stage 1 to stage 5] would be outstanding per-
is technically validated; the timeliness / com- formance,” he said.
pleteness of it, and the benefit it provides in Good data governance is unlikely to be
relation to the costs of providing it. achieved entirely voluntarily, he said. At
Customers might do well to see infor- some point, you will need someone on your
mation as a product of their business, just like side who can say to people who don’t want
any product – and give it the same level of to comply “why does anyone care what you
attention. think” and “do you like working here,” he
Many people struggle to answer the said.
question “what is enterprise architecture for,”
he said. The best answer is maybe that it is Download presentations
about connecting the IT systems with the Presentations from this event are available
business. “All IT is about information. So en- on the PPDM website. Go to
terprise architecture had better be about sup- www.ppdm.org, select ‘events’, select
porting quality management.” ‘past events’ then select Jan 28, 2010
Mr West said that it is important to see PPDM User Group Meeting in London.
data management as a gradual process which
thousands of in-
dividuals
around the
world. It is
these people
and these
smaller, often
hidden, data
providers that
are the subject
of this paper.
Three ma-
jor oil compa-
nies decided to
find out how
valuable these
smaller sources
might be by
commissioning
studies across People's attics - where lots of oil and gas data is stored
three separate
areas: The Arctic (2007); Iraq - finding data considered to be of significant value to their
that had been removed from the country exploration programme.
(2008); and China with a focus on Chinese For Iraq, of the 72 sources identified
language sources (2008). more than half were previously unknown
The Arctic study identified 231 of and considered to be of value. Many indi-
which were not previously known and were viduals (both inside and outside Iraq) have

data in attics and garages, and some data has
been sold on an exclusive basis to a major
oil company.
The China study added the foreign lan-
guage dimension, and relied heavily on na-
tive speakers with knowledge of the local oil
and gas sector. There is a wealth of infor-
mation online and in the public domain.
Sources
In undertaking their research at university it
is common for PhD students to have better
access to hard data than oil companies. The
resulting interpretations can contain valuable
insights into potential plays and prospects
but in many countries these reports are
archived and rarely see the light of day. Sev-
eral oil companies have “found oil” in these
rarely seen documents, often engaging the
services of local students (who understand
the language) to carry out the research.
Other little known sources of data in-
clude the obscure Russian Institute of For-
eign Geology (www.vzg.ru) which col-
lects data gathered by Russians abroad, a
similar institute in China (World Data Cen-
ter for Geology, China), Woodenski.com
which sells out of date geology books, and
The University of Tulsa which has 1 million
abstracts online – pa.utulsa.edu.
Besides finding valuable sources of in-
formation many lessons were learned about
the challenges associated with finding, in-
dexing and integrating external data.
Finding the sources
This step was considered to be a great value
when going into a new area. And better
sources were found by engaging local in-
country resources (who often knew where to
find the data outside their own country).
In the absence of a global database of
people, the recruitment companies offer a
stop gap alternative. Rather than searching
for skills ask the recruitment company to
search for the basin and field names you are
seeking to explore.
And of course one of the most valuable
sources will be the oil companies who have
previously relinquished acreage in your tar-
get area – assuming of course they can still
find the data (no guarantee there!).
Indexing and integrating
Data was often poorly and inconsistently for-
matted. Metadata structures were inconsis-
tent, even on header information for au-
thored documents coming from the same
source. Where large document databases ex-
ist they often come with poor search inter-
faces. It is no surprise that the customer lists
of these providers is restricted to the larger
companies who can afford librarians to make
sense of the complex search interfaces.
Even with cultural data dictionaries and
comprehensive taxonomies, natural lan-
guage processing code still had to be devel-
oped to scan and rewrite the metadata so that
it could be integrated with each company’s
in-house systems.
Conclusions and recommendations
There is a gap in the market. We have pow-
erful generic search engines such as Google
at one extreme, and industry specific but pro-
prietary data vendors such as IHS at the oth-
er. What is missing is a search tool with the
power of Google but with a structured ener-
gy index that makes sense of oil industry da-
ta and knowledge. There are some partial
solutions in the market already.
Metacarta integrated with IHS basins,
fields, wells does enable you to attach thou-
sands of publicly available documents to
wells, fields, basins etc. The drawback is
that you need a license for both Metacarta
and IHS to make this work.
There are a growing number of infor-
mation portals including Onepetro, Petrole-
um Abstracts, search4oil.com.
To bridge the gap a number of elements
are needed:
An “opensource” cultural data diction-
ary (wells, fields, basins, blocks, pipelines)
An “opensource” industry subject tax-
onomy (Digital Earth is seeking partners to
build this element)
Against this, all data, documents, news
AND people can be indexed in an industry
specific and freely available search site, in-
cluding a collaboration platform for automat-
ic uploading and indexing of data, documents
Places you can find oil and gas data
March 2010 - digital energy journal
Exploration
and CVs.
As the
industry spe-
cific search
technology
improves the
number of
sources will
grow expo-
nentially.
And the same Finding more places you
tools will al- can find oil and gas data -
low for a viral Robert Winsloe, president,
Digital Earth
indexing of
people
through an online collaboration platform.
Internally I would recommend a simi-
lar approach. It would be easier to achieve
(although not without major expenditure) by
licensing the IHS cultural data dictionary
and the Petroleum Abstracts taxonomy.
Software tools that have been employed in-
ternally with success include Autonomy,
Metacarta.
Today, the major oil companies have
the resources to play this game, to find the
obscure and yet valuable resources, to track
down that one document in the University
archive that will lead them to a major dis-
covery, and to find the people who will help
them make the most of that opportunity.
And like e-Bay and Google, the new in-
dustry specific search and collaboration
technologies will enable the thousands of
smaller companies to compete on an equal
footing with the major companies.
Our internal data is not so much the tip
of the iceberg but the head of a very long tail.
19
 Exploration
Collaborating to optimise fracturing
Schlumberger brought a project team together at its central London collaborative visualization
environment, so they could work together on finding the best way to optimise a hydraulic fracturing
operation in the Southern North Sea.
By Jaime Vargas, Schlumberger Information Solutions (SIS)
With the ever-growing, increasingly remote
opportunities and demanding challenges of
the North Sea exploration and drilling envi-
ronment, there is a need for precise data and
quick, accurate decisions if the high costs of
oil and gas field development are to be con-
tained.
3D visualization using advanced E&P
software technology in collaborative visuali-
zation environments (CVEs) is fast becom-
ing a necessity, rather than a mere luxury.
This tactical, one-stop (often one-day)
method for holding technical meetings en-
ables cross-discipline project team members
and other stakeholders to collaborate in real
time amongst themselves, as well as with
drilling technicians and technologists at the
wellsite.
Develop the gas field
An international gas company, two inde-
pendent oil and gas exploration and produc-
tion company partners, plus a drilling serv-
ices provider and reservoir stimulation con-
sultants came together to strategically plan
well placement during the development
phase of a large, complex gas field located
in the UK Southern North Sea.
The diverse, multi-discipline project
team had already had two successful well
planning sessions during which it used
Schlumberger’s Duchess Street, London
iCenter high-tech meeting facility, with 3D
images from Petrel software projected on
large viewing screens used for collaborative
analysis, discussion, and decision making
20 digital energy journal - March 2010
Schlumberger technology to focus primarily
on a geohazard assessment of the field.
However, both of these sessions were
held outside of London’s city limits, in loca-
tions that were not particularly convenient
for all of the team members and also re-
quired they make huge time commitments
ranging from several days to several weeks.
This arrangement ran the risk of some peo-
ple not showing up at all, thus defeating the
purpose of a collective, real-time discussion.
Well planning sessions are the ideal
type of meetings to hold in a collaborative
visualization environment since collaborat-
ing in a room with high-resolution imagery
projected onto a large, wall-size screen is
key to fully examining all the possible sce-
narios and ascertaining the best possible well
path for drilling.
Jaime Vargas, Schlumberger Information
Solutions (SIS)
Centralize critical well planning
activities
The next project phase for this field’s devel- ultimately decrease the amount of time re-
opment involved the exploitation of a tight quired to achieve the desired well placement
gas reservoir using hydraulic fracturing to results.
improve reservoir permeability within high-
ly porous eolian sandstones, which would Different modeling approaches
necessitate careful placement of sub-hori- The Schlumberger Duchess Street iCenter
zontal well paths. facility in London was chosen as the most
The placement of the proposed wells suitable, conveniently located meeting place
was extremely critical, so that the optimal of its kind for assembling all decision mak-
stratigraphic horizons could promote frac- ers to discuss in-depth the gas field well
ture propagation. These challenging circum- placement issues.
stances were further complicated by existing The facility offered a secure, networked
seismic data that was rather poor. environment with a state-of-the-art infra-
Because the intricate well planning structure that runs integrated software sys-
called for close collaboration, integrated tems, enabling the proposed well paths to be
software and high-quality visualization, the easily viewed on large projection screens
follow-up project meeting was moved to a and be updated in real time directly into Pe-
centralized, fully equipped Schlumberger trel seismic-to-simulation software models.
iCenter* secure networked collaboration vi- Two-dimensional interpretation was the
sualization environment. input for independent rock-mechanics analy-
This CVE environment was selected to sis, which became the driver for this meet-
facilitate a confidential technical meeting ing.
consisting of project partners and all mem-
bers of the asset team, using the Petrel* Independent analysis
shared earth model to redesign newly pro- Previously conducted independent analysis
posed well paths based on discussions of the had shown the project team that the best lo-
day. cation for reservoir fracturing should target
It was thought that the meeting location two specific stratigraphic intervals lying be-
and format would not only allow a more con- tween zones with high principal stress.
venient venue for ensuring attendance and If these stress zones were to be punc-
optimizing teamwork, but it would also tured by the planned fracturing, the develop-
greatly improve decision making quality and ment strategy would be adversely affected.
 ID C ’10
International Digital Oilfield Conference
Best Practices for Design and
Implementation of DOF
April 20–21, 2010
Hilton Hotel, Abu Dhabi

KEY PARTICIPANTS

Abdul Munim Saif Al Kindy, General Manager, ADCO

Kamal Morsi ADNOC Ahmed Bin Amro ADCO
John Hofland ADCO Julia Vindasius Kongsberg
Dave Cobb ADMA-OPCO Bart Stafford SAIC
Nicolas Kessler TOTAL Suresh Jacob Well Dynamics
Fahad Meshal Saudi Aramco Horia Orenstein SAS Institute
Elie Daher Schlumberger Tony Edwards StepChange Global
Damon Brady SAIC Grant Paterson Weatherford
Jim Costigan Weatherford Espen Storkaas ABB
Ali Jama Schlumberger Marise Mikulis Baker Hughes
Matt Regan Baker Hughes Phil Camp SAIC
Mohammad Kurdi SAS Institute Omar Saleh Microsoft
David Cameron Kongsberg Hossam Farid Oracle
Klaus Muller Shell Cedric Bouleau Schlumberger
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 Exploration
Geophysical analysis confirmed that it
was critical to keep the fractures away from
faults. This detailed analysis was used in the
iCenter collaborative discussions to propose
and determine the best new well paths for
the field.

Well path redesign

A normal well-planning workflow typically
encompasses many iterations and takes a lot
of time for all parties to reach a consensus.
In this case, the immersive iCenter en-
vironment enabled various well paths to be
viewed, analyzed, and redesigned in real
time against the 3D framework of the Petrel
reservoir model, seismic survey data, and
map and section views to position the wells
within the targeted stratigraphic intervals.
Using the Petrel shared earth model al-
lowed geophysicists, geologists, petrophysi-
cists, drillers and fracture experts to make
joint decisions “in context” and to efficient-
ly redesign the paths of four (out of five)
proposed wells in the time span of only four Petrel 3D model of Babbage field well zones and pressure, with various colors representing
hours. different amounts of principal stress

Maximized well planning

effectiveness
The advanced technological capabilities of
the Duchess Street iCenter facility maxi-
mized effective well planning among the as-
set team members, the project partners, and
the contractors working at the actual drilling
site.
Taking full advantage of the iCenter fa-
cility, the project team refined the proposed
four well paths based on different modeling
methods until all parties were satisfied with
the final outcome.
The end result was a successfully re-
designed well path that allowed the optimal
placement and effectiveness of hydraulic
fracturing under the tight reservoir condi-
tions.
This one-day session demonstrated
how in-depth well analysis and planning
could be accomplished in a matter of hours,
Base reservoir map showing revised well paths for Babbage field. Blue lines indicate revised well
in contrast with previous methods that tradi- paths and red lines indicate CP4 wells. The scale bar measurements are in meters, while the
tionally lasted for several days or even structural color key is in feet (showing just the area of interest)
weeks.
The iCenter meeting approach stream-
lined the well planning workflow, focused
the attention of all team members at the same
place at the same time, and reduced costs as Jaime Vargas is the Reservoir Characteri- He earned his MSc in Petroleum En-
a direct result of the speed and accuracy of zation Marketing Manager for Schlum- gineering from the University of Oklaho-
the collective team-based decisions. berger Information Solution based in ma, where he focused on Geological
It follows that speed and confidence in Houston, Texas. He holds a BSc in Geol- Modeling and Simulation. Jaime has been
decisions improve when joint technical dis- ogy from the National University of working for the last 10 years both in North
cussions are held in the presence of high- Colombia, along with a BSc in Petroleum and South America building and simulat-
quality data and integrated systems, since Engineering from the America University, ing geo-cellular models.
time-consuming iterations are for the most also in Colombia.
part eliminated from the well planning
process. * mark of Schlumberger

22 digital energy journal - March 2010

 Production

IT - Fitting the data together

For oil companies to fit together data from different sources across their company, you need a
comprehensive 'reference semantic architecture' to explain how it all should fit. Mike Brulé explains.

E&P operators are developing systems that and complex-event processing (CEP) to en- number of
attempt to integrate more data types across a able new kinds of responsive and intelligent detailed and
broader range of E&P domains. business processes that were impractical un- complex
More models and applications than til recently. standards
ever, each with their own internal data mod- The end result is real-time insight into including
els and formats, have to be integrated. what is happening by continuously combin- ISO
For example, reservoir and production ing individual data points, across numerous 15926/iR-
engineering can be enhanced by combining subject areas, into higher-level complex ING/FIAT-
historical (accumulated over years), tactical events that summarize and abstract the col- ECH, ISA
(weeks to months), and high-frequency data lective significance of the data. This enables S88/S95,
from historians (sub-seconds to days) with you to make decisions. OpenO&M/
data from shared-earth-modeling and disci- Events and data are processed and ana- MIMOSA,
pline-oriented modeling systems. lyzed across many subject areas to enhance Energistics
Subject areas include geology, petro- business transparency, predictive analytics, WITSML/
physics, reservoir, production, facilities, decision-making, and performance manage- PRODML/ How to build an architecture
geospatial, financial, enterprise resource ment. RESQML, for your data - Mike Brulé
planning, enterprise asset management, sup- So far, real-time monitoring portals and OPC
ply chain, engineering design systems, pro- historians have been coupled with model- UA/Xi, PIDX/ CIDX, OAGIS, Ther-
curement & construction, condition-based based optimization loops. But because the moML/ProcessML, and others.
monitoring, maintenance repair & overhaul. underlying applications model only specific The POSC Caesar Association, the
To sense and respond to individual “subject silos,” they are not predictive across steward of ISO 15926, collaborates with
events as soon as possible, you need a com- all subjects across the E&P continuum. OLF and other standards organizations such
bination of event-driven architecture (EDA) as Energistics.
Reference
semantic Choosing a standard
architecture The selection of the interoperability standard
So the reference depends on the domain for which the appli-
Petroleum
P etroleum economics
economics semantic architec- cation is being developed.
ttraining—efficiently
raining—ef ficiently ture (how all the For example, for production optimiza-
standards come to- tion, the Energistics PRODML standard is
eevaluate
valuate iinvestment
nvestment gether) is critical. often selected, while for gas-plant engineer-
ooptions
ptions Multiple stan- ing, procurement, and construction, ISO
dards, semantic in- 15926 is usually selected. In IAM, subsur-
Schlumberger IInformation
Schlumberger nformation SSolutions
olutions aannounces
nnounces teroperabilities, face well production equipment and surface
a THREE-DA
TTHREE-DAYAY PETROLEUM EECONOMICSCONOMICS S and other diverse processing facilities are connected in the
TR
RAINING COURSE sspecifically
TRAINING pecifically designed
designed ffor
or
capabilities all simulation.
E&P
E&P professionals
professionals interested
interested in
in commercial
commercial
and
and ccorporate
orporate planning.
planning. have to be support- Much of the data are common to both
ed in one holistic the subsurface and surface domains, so in-
The
The ttraining
raining will
will ggive
ive pparticipants:
articipants:
integration plat- teroperability between PRODML and ISO
QAAnn iintroduction
ntroduction ttoo ppetroleum
etroleum eeconomics,
conomics,
Merak is a mark of Schlumberger. © 2010 Schlumberger. All rights reserved. 10-IS-0119

form that is plat- 15926 becomes a necessity.

rrisk/decision
isk/decision aanalysis,
nalysis, aand
nd uuncertainty
ncertainty
mmodeling
odeling ffor
or aasset
sset mmanagement
anagement uusing
sing
form and vendor- In addition, other data types, for exam-
MMerak
erak ssoftware
oftware neutral. ple pressure / volume / temperature (PVT)
Q A
Ann uunderstanding
nderstanding ooff ppetroleum
etroleum eeconomics
conomics This includes experimental data needed to tune equations
in
in the
the ccontext
ontext ooff tthe
he North
North SSea.
ea. information inter- of state and pseudocomponent translations
operability, inter- for tracking streams in an integrated asset
Dates
Dates
a & LLocations:
ocations:
Crawley,
C r
rawley, LLondon:
ondon: 12 –14 May 2010
12–14 action interoper- model also need to be included as integrated
Aberdeen:
A b
berdeen: 26–28
26 –28 May 2010 ability, service in- information in the RSA. This potentially
teroperability, reels in standards from the chemicals indus-
For iinformation
For nformation aand
nd rregistration,
egistration,
ggoo ttoo w
www.slb.com/training
ww.slb.com/training oorr ee-mail
-mail process interoper- try, such as ThermoML.
UKSISTraining@slb.com.
U KSISTraining@slb.com. ability and syntac- E&P companies want to integrate with
tic interoperability other systems, such as ERP or maintenance,
for XML stan- repair, and overhaul (MRO), not just within
dards. their field-based data-historian and process-
The E&P in- control infrastructure.
dustry includes a Historians provide real-time transfor-
 Production
Figure 1: Next-Generation Reference Semantic Architecture Combining Historians and MPP Databases
mation and intuitive visualization of time-
series data from drilling rigs, wells, com-
pressors, and other oilfield equipment, which
are essential in detecting process events,
faults, and upsets.
Just as real-time fault detection, work-
flow, and business process management
(BPM) are not well supported by strategic in-
telligence by itself, detailed reporting and pre-
dictive analytics are not well supported using
only historians for operational intelligence.
Example of an RSA
The next-generation RSA shown in Figure 1
incorporates several levels of analytics to
better support complex event processing in
an event-driven architecture: surveillance
analytics, BI analytics, complex event pro-
cessing analytics, and predictive analytics.
A major capability of the RSA is to
cleanse and integrate data for in-depth analy-
sis by the E&P industry's sophisticated full-
physics models, represented by "Optimiza-
tion Tools" in Figure 1.
Flat-file historians and an MPP (mas-
sively parallel processing) relational data
warehouse would be combined to further en-
able the different levels of analytics (see An-
24 digital energy journal - March 2010
alytics L1 to L4 in Figure 1).
Historians would provide for real-time
monitoring and event processing for surveil-
lance.
The subject-area source systems are the
"systems of record" for many E&P technical
and business functions, for example, surface
facilities maintenance, well information, or
materials management. Figure 1 shows just
a few examples of the many dozens of ex-
amples of E&P subject-area source systems.
Both subject-area data in relational
databases and time-series data captured in
historians would be integrated into the mas-
ter data of the Reference Semantic Architec-
ture (RSA)’s integrated information model.
This integration can be accomplished by
combining historians and massively parallel
processing (MPP) databases.
An MPP (massively parallel process-
ing) database would support data warehous-
ing for flexible reporting needs, input to full-
physics IAM, "what-if" analyses, as well as
predictive analytics through AI and data-
mining techniques.
Historians and MPP databases provide
the best of both worlds in the next-genera-
tion RSA because they support both surveil-
Strategic
Strategic Intelligence
Intelligence
Operational
Operational Intelligence
Intelligence
lance and optimization with high scalability
and performance.
Conclusion
E&P companies are not likely to implement
a completely mature RSA in a single project
effort, but they can move forward on a
roadmap with key milestones to integrate ad-
ditional interoperability standards and grow
their logical data model in a systemized
manner.
The resulting next-generation RSA will
be capable of supporting the full continuum
of strategic and operational intelligence for
integrated operations and DOF. Such a com-
prehensive RSA enables integration into
larger workflows, paving the way for un-
precedented improvements in the E&P busi-
ness.
About the author
Mike Brulé is principal of Technoma-
tion®, a consultancy for E&P information
management, software development, and
model-based integration.
www.linkedin.com/in/michaelr
brule

Gorgon mega project needs “disciplined
approach to project management”
The North West Australia Gorgon project is the largest ever natural resource project in Australia,
producing 15m tons of LNG annually. Chevron and its partners are rigorously applying lessons learned
from past mega project execution to ensure a predictable project outcome.
The Gorgon project in North West Australia is
Australia’s biggest ever natural resource proj-
ect, aiming to produce 15m tons of LNG an-
nually from 3 trains.
To illustrate the size of the project, the
contracts with one of the biggest suppliers, GE
Oil & Gas, are worth over $1.1B , including
turbomachinery equipment for Gorgon’s LNG
compression, CO2 reinjection and power gen-
eration components, as well as subsea equip-
ment (including manifolds, pipeline termina-
tion, system integration testing and support)
and services.
Projects the size of Gorgon require own-
ers, equipment suppliers, and engineering and
construction contractors all rigorously apply
their project delivery and quality management
systems to ensure expected project outcomes.
said Michael Illanne, president and general
manager of Chevron Project Resources Com-
pany, the organization providing key personnel
and management practices for the project,
speaking at the GE Oil & Gas User annual
meeting held in Florence, Italy, on Feb 1-2.
“The bank account is the reservoir, and
complex reservoirs need a disciplined ap-
proach to reservoir appraisal,” he said.
“The impact of subsurface uncertainty re-
ally has to be taken into account in the pace of
setting the basis of design for surface facility
designs to avoid expensive rework. It’s critical
in optimising value. Large projects such as
Gorgon require certainty that we can fill the fa-
cility to capacity on a reliable basis.”
The bigger the project, the more complex
it gets, and more the need is to be more thor-
ough about everything. “The penalty for un-
derperformance is quite high. But we know
predictable performance is achievable,” he
said.
For very large projects, “additional rigour
is needed in planning project execution,” he
said. “Staffing and training has to start early.
Ownership of operations readiness has to be at
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an asset level, in other words, senior level op-
erations management must be involved early
and “own” decisions made in front end engi-
neering design. ”
When asked by associates if we could fo-
cus on just one thing, Mr Illanne states that it
would be a “more robust effort to identify,
quantify and mitigate risk. Too often risks are
underestimated – or management of risk left to
lower levels in the organisation. We’re work-
ing to step up our game managing predictable
outcomes for these large scale projects and we
need our suppliers and the engineering, pro-
curement and project management contractors
to do the same.”
Risks must be broadly considered in a
project’s Risk Management Plan and include
both technical and non-technical issuessuch as
security, transport, labour relations, customs
clearance, and geopolitical factors, he said.
“7-8 years ago we thought we might
achieve economies of scale on big projects –
but now the opposite is true,” he said. “There
are multiple work sites, multiple languages,
and the sheer number of people that have to be
managed.”
For large upstream projects, particularly
deepwater, drilling and completion design
needs to be significantly advanced in the de-
sign phase, ahead of project sanction, he said.
“Mega projects require exhaustive upfront ex-
ecution planning.”
The Chevron-operated Gorgon Project is
a joint venture between the Australian sub-
sidiaries of Chevron (approximately 47 per-
cent), ExxonMobil (25 percent), Shell (25 per-
cent), Osaka Gas (1.25 percent), Tokyo Gas (1
percent) and Chubu Electric Power (0.417 per-
cent). It includes tie-back of two gas fields to
the plant facilities, one requiring a 147 km, 34
inch diameter pipeline, the 2nd longest subsea
tieback ever constructed.
The subsea trees weigh over 65 tonnes,
some of the biggest ever.
• Marginal fields - September
• Exploration technology and business -
Oct 7-8
Production
Michael Illanne, president and general manager
of Chevron Project Resources Company,
speaking at the GE Oil & Gas User annual
meeting held in Florence, Italy, on Feb 1-2.
The raw gas from the Gorgon field con-
tains a significant amount of CO2 – which will
be separated from the gas stream, re-pressursed
and reinjected into a saline aquifer underlying
the area where the plant facilities are located.
This will be the largest CO2 injection seques-
tration project in the world, he says. The com-
pany will use “4D” seismic monitoring to man-
age the carbon dioxide injection. There will be
6 compression trains for the carbon dioxide,
the largest CO2 compression trains ever con-
structed.
More than 20 locations around the world
are being co-ordinated for work on Gorgon, in-
cluding 5 in Australia, Houston, Dallas, Nor-
way, Japan, South Korea, Thailand, and Singa-
pore.,.
Chevron’s Project Resources Company
is currently supporting approximately 62 large
upstream and downstream projects for
Chevron worldwide, where between 26-
30,000 construction and supplier contractor-
personnel go to work each day. Chevron Proj-
ect Resources Company has more than 600
employees supporting those projects which al-
so leverage more than two thousand contrac-
tors and other Chevron employees in the “own-
ers” teams managing the work.
• Oil supply and demand - November
• Digital energy technology - December
 Production
GE Oil & Gas – equipment reliability
GE Oil & Gas has a range of initiatives underway to constantly help improve the availability, reliability, and
performance of oil and gas equipment for operators. GE presented some latest developments at its 11th
annual meeting held on February 1-2 in Florence, Italy.
GE Oil & Gas is spending $500m on re-
search and development over the next three
years to help the global industry meet big
technology challenges and the rising de-
mand for oil and gas.
A portion of the research funding will
be focused on finding ways to improve the
reliability, performance and availability of
existing GE equipment, and helping oil and
gas companies keep their infrastructure
well maintained to improve efficiency and
the life cycle.
Part of GE’s focus is in the provision
of remote monitoring and diagnostic serv-
ices to help operators monitor, test and tune
installed equipment on land and also sub-
sea. Some of these advanced technology
applications come from GE’s work in the
healthcare industry.
Claudi Santiago, President and CEO
of GE Oil & Gas, emphasises that there
will always be risks with new innovations
in oil and gas equipment, but GE has a rig-
orous process in place to minimise the risks
to early adopters. “When we put it in a box
and bring it to you, we want to be confi-
dent that we have done everything possible
to test its performance, including testing
the prototype to destruction if necessary,”
he says.
“When it comes to innovations this in-
dustry is naturally conservative, and we un-
derstand why given the costs and potential
health and safety and environmental impli-
cations, but to meet the huge challenges of
rising oil and gas demand we have to take
a little more aggressive approach.”
“I am not telling you that we can guar-
antee success every single time because we
cannot. But I’m telling you that GE Oil &
Gas innovates in a well-proven and safe
way,” he says.
High temperature tools
GE is 2 years into a 5-year research pro-
gram, with funding from the US Depart-
ment of Energy, to make digital electronics
for a downhole drilling system that can op-
erate reliably at 300 degrees C.
Electronics which can operate reliably
at higher temperatures is something which
is much in demand from companies en-
gaged in unconventional drilling applica-
tions such as shale gas, and oil sands steam
injection, as well as conventional applica-
26 digital energy journal - March 2010
tions where drilling deeper goes hand in
hand with higher temperatures.
Digital electronics in drilling systems
can currently operate at around 175 degrees
C – thereby limiting the depth that can be
drilled to around 25,000 feet. Mechanical
components can operate at higher tempera-
tures, but not the electronics to power
them.
If the electronics could operate at tem-
peratures up to 300 degrees it would be
possible to drill to around 35,000 to 38,000
feet (about 7 miles). “These additional 3
miles provide major opportunities for op-
erators,” says Jim Junker, general manag-
er, Oilfield Technology with GE Oil & Gas.
“When we talked to customers around
a third indicated that drilling at high tem-
peratures is the major challenge they face
in enhancing efficiency over the next 3-5
years,” says Mr Junker.
GE calculates that the oil and gas in-
dustry spends $2bn annually on downhole
tools, of which 5 per cent is spent on high
temperature downhole tools, an increase
from 0.5 per cent 4 years ago. GE believes
that 15 per cent of the total downhole tool
market could be spent on higher tempera-
ture tools if they were available. “Every-
where you look, things are getting deeper,
hotter and harder to get to,” he says.
The US Department of Energy grant
was awarded in 2009. It is the second stage
of a project, where the first stage was to de-
velop analogue electronics that could sur-
vive at 300 degrees, which GE is very close
to achieving.
The project requires developing dif-
ferent materials for the electronics. For ex-
ample, normal electronics uses solder
which is a made from a mixture of tin and
lead. Tin melts at 230 degrees C and lead
melts at 325 degrees C, he says. So a high-
temperature solder needs to be made from
different materials.
The technology can also contribute to
making geothermal energy possible. Geot-
hermal energy involves very deep wells,
with water pumped into one well and
brought up in the other well as steam. It
needs very deep drilling and this needs
electronics that can survive at high temper-
atures. Unlike drilling for oil and gas where
high temperature is a by-product of the lo-
cation of the resources, geothermal energy
Keeping your rotating equipment operating:
GE has many ways to maintain equipment
availability
specifically seeks out higher temperatures
to improve efficiency of energy generation.
Making geothermal energy possible is one
of the reasons why the US Department of
Energy is funding the research, Mr Junker
says.
Inspecting risers
GE Oil & Gas has developed a new version
of its RADAR ‘Riser Active Data Acquisi-
tion Recorder’, a device which can make
an electronic inspection of riser joints on
offshore platforms.
The GE RADAR device is a small ro-
bot which travels down the riser, scanning
it as it goes, checking the wall thickness
and welds, and monitoring corrosion, cre-
ating a 3D map of the riser. It can test 6 ris-
er joints a day.
One company, Dolphin Drilling, used
the tool to inspect all of the riser strings on-
board the rig, while the rig was in transit
from the Gulf of Mexico to West Africa.
It is not yet possible to test riser joints
that are actually in operation, but to be able
to test riser joints on the platforms, or at
sea, is a big improvement from having to
send them back to shore.
The old way of testing risers was very
expensive – the riser joints needed to be
sent back to shore for testing – pulled out
of the water, put on a barge, sent to shore
and put on a truck, which could only carry
2 riser joints at a time.
Riser joints are under a lot of stress
and are expected to operate for 25-30
years. They can develop leaks during this
 Production
time, or even a connection parting, with
riser dropping onto the sea floor. The only
way to avoid these problems is a regular
inspection program.
The latest version of RADAR has 32
transducers all around it, so there is no
need to rotate the head to get images in all
directions. The unit is 2-3 times faster than
the previous version.
There is a smaller version of the tool
that can inspect pipe of 3-4 inch inside di-
ameter. This tool is about half a metre long.
It is pulled through the riser by rope.

Subsea controls upgrade

GE is upgrading subsea control systems on
Statoil’s Tordis and Vigdis fields, which
have been operating since 1990. It is using
its new SemStar5 subsea electronics com-
mand & monitoring system, which is de-
signed to be as standardised as possible,
and provides the opportunity to monitor the
field remotely. The new system will be in-
stalled during 2010/11.
The existing electronics in use at
Tordis and Vigdis were designed during the
early 1990’s, with control system software
written specifically for the installation.
Making a new control system that can work
GE is helping companies improve the control systems on their subsea equipment
with the old electronics is very difficult.
“It is very hard rebuilding equipment
with 15 year old electronics at its heart,”
says Neil Saunders, global services leader
- Drilling and Production, GE Oil & Gas.
The old control systems run using
fairly low communications speed com-
pared to what is available now, Mr Saun-
ders says. The field has equipment from
other manufacturers apart from GE, which
means additional challenges in making the
control system work as an integrated
whole.
The cost of supporting older equip-
ment can only increase over time, and mar-
gins for the company providing the support
diminish. “So for us to put in something
easier to support has returns for both us and
the customer,” he says.
By installing new control systems, it

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 Production
should be possible to extend field life and
end up with a system that is far more flex-
ible, says Mr Saunders. It means it is much
easier to add additional instrumentation if
it is ever required.
The control system is configured for
the Tordis/Vigdis field based on individual
modules that are selected for the applica-
tion. It uses standard TCP-IP infrastructure.
To change the control system, GE
does not need to recover the subsea tree,
just remove the control system with a Re-
mote Operated Vehicle, and then install a
new one, with an adapter plate, to fit the
existing, in-place connections.
The new subsea equipment can be
supported remotely at GE’s facility in Sta-
vanger (Norway) and from the GE Oil &
Gas specialist engineering centre in the
UK.
Subsea monitoring
GE Oil & Gas opened a new SmartCenter
in Nailsea, UK, in October 2009, for con-
ducting remote monitoring and diagnostics
of subsea equipment, as a ‘centre of excel-
lence’ for subsea monitoring.
The company got the idea for the fa-
cility in 2007, when staff worked over the
Christmas holidays in the office to assist
the commissioning of a new field in Ango-
la, receiving screenshots from GE staff in
Angola by e-mail. “It was very tedious,”
says Rod Tester, services product manager.
“We thought – we really need something
more ‘live’ and immediate”.
So the decision was made to set up
24/7 continuous monitoring capability, en-
abling equipment on all subsea fields
around the world to be monitored directly
from the UK.
At the facility, GE staff can support
local operators and help them to understand
various data streams that are reported on
their screens.
They can get detailed information
about how the subsea equipment is operat-
ing. “We can look at all the data – such as
tracking insulation resistance, hydraulic
leaks, valve signatures, to provide useful
data to transform the effectiveness of all
maintenance activities,” says Mr Tester.
Staff can also download historical da-
ta and try to find out what has been hap-
pening. They can put the data through an
emulator to try to work out what has been
happening in the equipment, e.g. events
leading up to an incident.
They can undertake remote health
checks of the subsea equipment. This can
potentially avoid healthy subsea control
equipment being brought back to shore for
repair. “Often we get a returned unit and
28 digital energy journal - March 2010
find there’s no fault in it – the fault is in
the external wiring and that wastes a lot of
time,” says Mr Tester.
In one case, the remote monitoring
services were used to solve a problem in
the Snøvhit field. “Snøvhit got back online
in 2 hours and avoided a potential 1 week
shutdown,” Mr Tester says.
The moment many customers start
thinking about condition monitoring is
when they have a problem that is very ex-
pensive to fix. “Operators say, if you’d
been monitoring the data you’d probably
have told us that there’s an issue coming
up,” Mr Tester says.
When GE asked its customers if they
were interested in having condition moni-
toring services for their subsea equipment,
“not one of them said no,” Mr Tester says.
It has an agreement with SPT to offer
their OLGA flow assurance software to its
customers, which also has an online ver-
sion. GE plans to offer services helping
companies manage slugs, chemical injec-
tion, and gas lift optimisation.
In future, Mr Tester envisages adding
reservoir monitoring capability to the
equipment monitoring, so it could help oil
companies make sure they are optimising
the flow out of the reservoir.
Remotely monitoring
turbomachinery equipment
GE Oil and Gas also operates an iCentre at
its Florence headquarters focused on re-
mote monitoring services and diagnostics
(RM&D) for installed turbomachinery
equipment. The iCenter is part of the larg-
er network of GE RM&D centers, includ-
ing Germany (wind turbines) and Atlanta
(Energy Frame Fleet) – all of which share
best practices and proprietary hardware &
software solutions to protect the confiden-
tiality of customers’ fleets.
Customer sites are connected to the
iCenter by an onboard RM&D system that
transmits data from the operating site to
Florence. Engineering software tools re-
viewing the data to detect any anomalies in
equipment operation. If an anomaly is de-
tected, GE Diagnostic engineers 24/7 con-
tact the customer immediately to advise
them of any possible issues, especially if it
could cause an unsafe condition. With
more notice of a potential problem, cus-
tomers can fix things at a convenient time.
In addition, information gathered can help
operators take advance measures to tune
and test equipment, thereby extending the
life cycle of equipment.
GE engineers also use the data in a
more proactive way to develop feasibility
studies and upgrade recommendations for
customers to optimize the performance of
their equipment, for example, proposed
conversion, modification and upgrade op-
tions that can improve production/efficien-
cy up to 20% through gas turbine and cen-
trifugal compressor upgrades.
Over the last three years, the moni-
tored fleet has shown an average availabil-
ity that is 1.5 pts higher than the unmoni-
tored fleet, and currently the iCenter is
monitoring 570 units at 80 sites for 40 cus-
tomers, amounting to the equivalent of 8
million hours of data.
GE is putting a lot of effort into build-
ing what it calls ‘knowledge services’ – or
having the ability to work out what is hap-
pening to a customer’s equipment based on
the data which the equipment are provid-
ing.
“As well as delivering immediate re-
al-time support, the objective is also to
build up models that show how the equip-
ment is meant to be working, and then
gradually compare actual performance with
the expected optimum and with the bench-
mark and average of same units in similar
conditions/applications”, says Filippo
Cinelli, new solutions introduction manag-
er of GE Oil & Gas.
“The knowledge acquired gathering
data about the unscheduled shutdowns that
do occur, helps GE to find out the most
common causes and work on those from a
systematic perspective to predict machine
behaviours avoiding troubleshooting. All
gas turbines GE produces have the capabil-
ity to be remotely monitored now built-in
as standard,” says Mr Cinelli.
GE can ‘tune and test’ the equipment
remotely, which is much better value than
sending experts to visit the actual plant, es-
pecially equipment that is in a harsh or re-
mote location which, for example, may
otherwise require gaining access via heli-
copters or be time consuming from a visa
application perspective.
Having the best knowledge usually
means harnessing some of the customers’
existing knowledge about how the equip-
ment runs – which means there needs to be
a close working relationship and trust be-
tween GE and the customer. It’s a pre-req-
uisite that customers are comfortable with
their operational data being handled by an
external partner – something that GE
spends a lot of time on from a compliance,
confidentiality and integrity perspective.
Once an anomaly is detected, the
tough part is in understanding what is caus-
ing it, Mr Cinelli says. “GE is developing
expert tools and root cause analysis sys-
tems which can do this faster.”
I N T E G R AT E D W E L L P L A N N I N G

www.ipres.com

• 0018
Decisions

Probability
Tornado
Time

Revenue – Cost – Schedule – Risks

· Efficient work process for all involved disciplines
· Single wells and well campaign analyses
· Ranking of alternatives and comparison of wells
· Well economics: cost, revenue, NPV, risks
· Fully stochastic approach
Production
Improving production at BP
Unconventional gas, improving water sweep, reducing deepwater costs and improving recovery – some
of the ways where BP anticipates it can improve production and reduce overall costs, said Jackie
Mutschler, vice president of BP’s Exploration and Production Technology Group, speaking at the GE Oil
and Gas user conference in Florence.
“We’re still learning how to predict uncon-
ventional,” said Jackie Mutschler, vice pres-
ident of BP’s Exploration and Production
Technology group, speaking at the GE Oil
and Gas annual user conference in Florence,
Italy, on Feb 1-2 2010.
“When I went to school we thought of
[shale] as seals not reservoirs.”
BP believes there’s 5 trillion barrels of
unconventional oil equivalent yet to be
found, she said. Much more than the 4.6 tril-
lion barrels difficult oil and gas and 1.6 tril-
lion barrels conventional oil and gas it be-
lieves is yet to be produced.
Apart from getting better at finding un-
conventional oil and gas, BP is focusing its
technology development on four areas: wa-
ter sweep, deepwater, fraccing and improv-
ing recovery factor, she said.
Water sweep supports 60 per cent of
BP’s production today, but much of it just
ends up in the production well. “We typical-
ly produce many times more water than oil.
It’s relatively inefficient – kind of a brute
force method,” she said.
BP and Shell and someone else have
developed a new material they call “Bright
Water”, which enters the reservoir as a liq-
uid, and expands or ‘pops’ when it reaches a
certain temperature. The idea is that if the
liquid heats up, it is an indication that it is
flowing directly into the production well –
and by expanding, it blocks the flow through
that pathway through the reservoir, driving
the sweep liquid to other parts of the reser-
voir.
The cost of this fluid works out at $3
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every Monday
per additional barrel of oil recovered, she
said.
For deepwater, BP is keen to find ways
to reduce costs. “Getting timely and inex-
pensive access is a challenge – it can be $1m
a day for deepwater rig,” she says.
Improving fraccing is a big area of in-
terest. “Anything we can do to break open
rocks more efficiently, effectively and with
less environmental impact is good,” she said.
BP is keen to find ways to improve
overall reservoir recovery. It is typical for
production operations to leave two thirds of
oil in the ground (33 per cent recovery). “But
we know the technical limit is much higher
– we can get to 60 per cent or so,” she said.
BP sees the recovery factor as a func-
tion of four factors: pore scale displacement
(how much oil is being pushed out of the
pores); drainage (how well the oil flows
from the reservoir to the wells); sweep (how
well water pushes the oil out of the reser-
voir); and economic cut offs – the point
where the reservoir ceases to be economic.
An interesting project has been held in
Alaska doing waterflood with water which
has less salt than seawater, called LoSal (for
low salinity), which reacts chemically with
the reservoir in different ways.
The LoSal technique increased produc-
tion at a cost of $5 per additional barrel pro-
duced, with overall recovery factor reaching
51 to 59 per cent. The technology has also
been used on the North Sea’s Clair field.
“Our belief is that there is a lot more room
to go,” she said.
BP is very keen to work out better ways
to use data to improve business decisions.
“Information technology has to be in-
corporated into workflows and people have
to modify how they work. That’s the hardest
at BP,” she said.
BP’s ‘Field of the Future’ project has
been installed on 700 wells making over
1.5m barrels of oil per day, with 2m data tags
installed, she said. “We get real time oil wa-
ter gas sand flow rates, facilities perform-
ance data, drilling data, borehole data.”
Altogether, “over the last 2 years, Field
of the Future has added 30,000 barrels of oil
per day for BP,” she said. “And demand for
technology and science is increasing.”
There have also been recent develop-
ments in seismic surveys, following two
decades of intense effort to improve seismic
processing and seismic survey techniques.
“Over the last couple of years we’ve created
‘independent simultaneous source,’ high
quality 3D data at a faster pace. We can ac-
quire in 1 year what used to take us 5 years,”
she said.
Other areas BP is interested in learning
more about include materials science, nan-
otechnology (including for remote sensing
and wireless telemetry), fracturing (includ-
ing polymers and gels to reduce the amount
of water needed), bioscience (e.g. for mak-
ing methane from coal) and microseismics,
using small earthquakes in the subsurface to
detect changes to the reservoir.
Much of the technology improvement
over the past two decades was focussed in
improving seismic technology – data pro-
cessing and gathering.
“Embedding Energistics open standards into
our E&P products allows Landmark to reduce
R&D costs and enhance connectivity with our
global customers.”
Paul Koeller
President Landmark Software & Services, Halliburton
 Production
Tessella's software for condition monitoring
R&D IT consultancy Tessella has developed a software solution to enable oil and gas companies set up
and deliver their own asset condition monitoring – and to optimise the use of this equipment by
operators.
R&D IT consultancy Tessella, HQ Oxford,
UK, has a software solution which oil and gas
companies can use to set up and deliver their
own asset condition monitoring.
Condition monitoring is a big challenge
for many companies – it is one thing to add
lots of sensors and gather a mass of data, but
quite another thing to turn it into answers to
key questions such as, “do I need to change
this part now or can it wait another 3
months?”
The Tessella approach allows the oper-
ating company to lay down benchmark meas-
urements that model a well functioning sys-
tem. Automated comparison of recent data
with the reference benchmark will spot any
drift away from normal operation. Tracking
that drift enables early warning of potential
issues. The advantage of this approach is that
the operating company can install the solu-
tion at their premises and monitor hardware
provided by third parties giving them a trust-
ed view on condition of the whole plant
whether it is owned by them or not.
The solution can be used for a wide
range of different equipment. “It puts togeth-
er the experience we’ve developed studying a
range of different components,” says Nick
Clarke, technical manager at Tessella. “Our
work in the transport sector has clearly
demonstrated that this is very much a viable
approach.”
“Every piece of equipment has a unique
set of operating signatures, so configuring a
system in advance to recognise all expected
failure signatures requires a lot of time and
specialist knowledge. By allowing them to
measure real signatures and identify problems
though signature change, our framework
hands control back to the operator. It also
means the monitoring remains effective when
the reality of ‘normal’ component behaviour
doesn’t match the theoretical levels from the
design specifications.
“The idea is enabling clients to get more
uptime out of the plant and predict problems
before they happen,” says Mark Claxton, en-
ergy global account director with Tessella.
“So companies can be prepared for every-
thing, do repairs in scheduled shut downs,
rather than have to react to failures or sched-
ule maintenance interventions at short no-
tice.”
Through regular automated assessment,
32 digital energy journal - March 2010
the software can spot gradual onset failure,
such as slow leaks or a stretching chain. The
alert thresholds are defined in the software by
the operator either as a hard limit or as a %
change from the benchmark. In addition to
using the total amount of change as an alert
trigger, the software can also use how fast
something is changing, or how variable that
change is, to predict in advance when compo-
nent degradation will cross a threshold.
Tessella offers services to configure the
solution at the client’s location and provide
remote administration and support for the in-
stalled software. The solution allows the
client to configure for themselves how to set
the benchmark measurements, how to meas-
ure and interpret change, how to define toler-
ances and how strict they should be, and what
alerts to raise when tolerances are exceeded.
The configured alerts include guidance to op-
erators on how to respond. This allows each
client to match the solution to their exact
needs and to fit tolerances to their the risk pro-
file and intervention strategy.
“You really want a system that tells you
where you are sitting in your acceptable range
– and what the recent movement has been
within that range – so you get an early indica-
tion of a change in behaviour,” says Dr
Clarke. “Equally, you have to recognise that
all systems fluctuate and the monitoring needs
to target persistent change to avoid false
alarms. We’ve put a lot of thought into that.”
Some customers use this approach in
parallel with the equipment supplier. Al-
though condition monitoring services may
have been provided by the supplier as part of
their guarantee, the operating company uses
the Tessella solution to independently meas-
ure equipment performance during this initial
phase. This gives them a dataset of system
behaviour from day one which will prove in-
valuable when identifying potential faults in
later years, after the guarantee has expired.
Ultimately, Tessella hopes to reach a
point where all maintenance processes are
carried out as a result of intelligence from a
condition monitoring system – rather than be-
ing done after a fixed period, as most mainte-
nance is done today.
One of the most important features of a
solution like this is capturing the operating
company tacit knowledge.
“Operators often already have an inti-
mate knowl-
edge of their
equipment –
what fail-
ures they
can expect
after which
periods of
time, and
what is an
acceptable
decay – and
Tessella can
help config-
ure the solu-
tion to work Helping you keep your
with this equipment within acceptable
know how,” operating range - Nick Clarke,
says Mr technical manager at Tessella.
Claxton.
People
Tessella is also developing tools which can
determine how consistently and efficiently the
equipment is being operated by different staff
members.
A machine is most efficient when transi-
tioned smoothly between its various operat-
ing levels and set in the correct level for the
job in hand. Continuous starting, stopping or
shifting modes is almost certainly inefficient.
The operating style can have a “huge impact
on energy costs and the strain on the asset,”
says Dr Clarke.
Tessella has implemented similar sys-
tems in the rail industry, which monitor how
trains are being driven. “Up until now, it has-
n’t been possible to know how different driv-
ers operate, without having an assessor in the
cab with them,” Dr Clarke says, “and this will
always make a driver take more care than usu-
al.
“By measuring how operators truly per-
form, day in day out, the least efficient staff
can be given extra training and mentoring to
allow them to reach the levels achieved by the
best.”
“The most effective organisations con-
centrate their maintenance and repair efforts
at their highest risk assets. People also need
attention in order to maximise their perform-
ance, and our software uses the same ideas to
allow companies to target their training re-
sources,” says Dr Clarke.
 Capturing, retaining, and transferring your
company’s most valuable asset
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Venue: Ardoe House Hotel, Aberdeen UK
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Colin Campbell Reid G. Smith, Ph.D.
Enterprise Content Management Director, Marathon
Director of Quality, Subsea 7
Oil Corporation
Fillippo Capriotti Maurice Tayeh
Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer,
Knowledge Management Specialist, Eni E&P Technip
Wendy Valot
Christy Clark Knowledge Management Consultant to BP
Director of Knowledge Sharing, ConocoPhillips
Robert Ward
Chris Collison Knowledge Management Advisor, Hess
former Director of Change and Knowledge
Management at Centrica and bestselling author of
“Learning to Fly” and “No More Consultants”

Free downloadable articles available online:

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 Production
Dangers of workflow
As the oil and gas industry rushes to implement ‘workflows’ Dutch Holland advises us of the dangers –
including too much focus on the workflow itself not the desired result; too much detail; not finishing off
the job; and scaring people.
The oil and gas industry is moving away
from “process” terminology and becoming
more comfortable with the term “workflow,”
used by the manufacturing industry for
decades.
In fact, at a recent Digital Energy con-
ference in Houston, commenting on what
has been obvious to many strategists for
years, a speaker observed that dealing with
the human component in energy technology
requires better understanding of workflow.
This is the right move at the right time
and energy companies can directly benefit
from what other industries have done before.
A major cog in getting the workflow
wheel well-oiled and turning properly is to
recognize that workflow should not be about
analysts grinding out technical work and
bringing it to the boss as work product in and
of itself.
Case in point involves all the compa-
nies that have let workflow become an ana-
lyst’s playground. When everybody wants
to analyze everything, typically nobody
wants to take the risk if no leader is there to
say “I’ll take responsibility.”
Some organizations were quicker than
others to see the mistake, slapped cold water
on their collective faces and rectified the
problem with strong leadership.
Eight dangers
Let’s examine eight dangers of workflow
that have too often been discovered the hard
way.
First, in what initially seems a good
idea, some companies decide to take the
plunge into workflow but quickly stub their
toe by making it “The Only Game in Town.”
How does this happen? Usually, these
companies got into workflow only after be-
ing too focused on technology to even get
near “workflow and people.” Then they
knee-jerk reacted and went overboard the
opposite way, getting so focused on work-
flow that they lost sight of the technology
and still failed to see the people component.
The solution is experienced leadership
and a tight hand on the reins to help prevent
a target fixation on workflow.
Danger No. 2 is “Out of the forest and
into the trees.” Workflow analysis and docu-
mentation can be too detailed, which results
in losing the common sense ingredient along
34 digital energy journal - March 2010
the way. All that is needed is just enough de-
tail allowing workers to proceed with the
next iterative step in the processes, technol-
ogy and people formulation. In combating
Danger No. 2, experienced and tightly ad-
ministered leadership is called for to let in
the light of workflow analysis with the ap-
propriate balance of detail and illumination.
Danger No. 3, “As Is Stays As Is,”
refers to the popular term used in workflow
analysis to describe how a company is doing
things right now, prior to making any im-
provements or adding new technology. How-
ever, this “here and now” snapshot can actu-
ally cloud people’s vision. In other words,
they tend to forget that why any documenta-
tion of “As Is” is being done is for better un-
derstanding to design and document “To
Be.” The latter is the real prize by being the
workflow the company wants in the future.
How to strike the right balance of time and
resources between “As Is” and “To Be”?
Again, that is what experienced leadership
exerting a tight hand should do.
Danger No. 4, “Means/Ends Reversal,”
brings up a problem common in many as-
pects of business, not just technology imple-
mentation. Workflow analysis and documen-
tation become the end rather than the means
and the result is less than tidy. In a hyperbol-
ic example, when a company announces its
intention to examine workflow, almost im-
mediately process “mappers,” analysts and
software tool aficionados appear out of the
blue, all of which focuses in precisely the
wrong direction i.e., the means and not the
end.
Organizations seem to love creating
new departments with multiple levels of pro-
fessional personnel. After workflow analysis
gets underway there is usually a clamor to
create the department with various people
actually volunteering to be in charge. How
to keep the focus on using means to reach
the ends? Look to experienced leadership
holding a tight hand on the reins to under-
stand that a Workflow Department is not
necessary to get workflow analysis and doc-
umentation done properly.
Danger No. 5 has the intriguing title,
“Tool Rapture.” This danger carries through
the ongoing theme of the eight dangers in
that people just flat-out lose their focus along
the way. In this scenario, companies in-
volved in
process work
can too easily
get enamored
with work-
flow tools. In
virtually the
blink of an
eye, tools un-
wittingly be-
come the stars
of workflow
mapping in-
stead of being
enablers. The emphasis on 'workflow'
The so- is good but there are
lution is to es- hidden dangers - Dutch
Holland, CEO Holland &
sentially drive Davis
the process
work in re-
verse by tak-
ing the focus off the glitz. The more simple
and straightforward the workflow tools, the
better the eventual DOF implementation will
be. For those always looking ahead toward
getting their hands on the newest exotic
tools, they can be reassured that fancier tools
are usually in the pipeline anyway. So, to
head off any impact presented by the tool
rapture danger and get the game back on
track, experienced leadership’s tight hand is
necessary to spot rapture and take action ac-
cordingly.
Danger No. 6, “Double Dutch,” plays
out as a “jump rope” schoolyard game with
two ropes going in opposite directions. Dig-
ital oilfield technology is one rope and the
automated workflow tool as the second rope.
Production personnel, the ultimate users,
dance frantically in the middle trying not to
get hit by either rope. In exerting a tight hand
on Double Dutch, experienced management
faces a somewhat tricky but doable task.
They must anticipate the likelihood of the
two technologies colliding, and prevent the
Double Dutch conflict from getting started
in the first place.
Danger No. 7, “Too Tired to Climb the
Final Hill,” is surely familiar to companies
throughout the oilpatch. Anybody within
shouting distance of complex technology im-
plementation knows the draining effects of
time-consuming, extra effort, huge invest-
ment and countless other frustrating details.
 OUT HERE, NOTHING COMES EASY.
EXCEPT CONFIDENCE.
PERFORMANCE. TECHNOLOGY. PEOPLE.

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 Communications
Just getting the new digital oilfield solution
up and running with processes aligned, and
people on board, trained and ready at “Go
Live” is often daunting.
Tired after climbing that first hill, many
are dismayed to find a second hill in sight.
This second hill, Optimization, calls for fine-
tuning technology, tweaking processes and
adjusting people as well as skill mixes … in
ERF Wireless –boom in wireless services
ERF Wireless of League City, Texas, has been ranked the 113th fastest growing company in North America
on Deloitte’s 2009 Technology Fast 500 list. Its business: supplying wireless communications to oilfields.
ERF Wireless of League City, Texas, is see-
ing a big business expansion, selling wireless
communications services to North American
oilfields – enough to place it 113th in De-
loitte’s list of the fastest growing technology
companies in North America for 2009.
The company currently offers WiMax,
WiFi, and other communications over
165,000 square miles of North America, in-
cluding most of the oil and gas development
and production areas in the US and Canada.
It also has coverage in New Mexico,
other areas of Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma,
Louisiana, Alberta and the British Columbia
Horn River area.
The company has been in business for
just 5 years – and saw the biggest growth in
the past 2 years. It has 85 employees.
Sales, to oil and gas customers, apart
from 11 key contracts, are handled exclusive-
ly by Schlumberger. As part of the exclusive
sales contract Schlumberger agrees to pro-
vide a guaranteed minimum level of business
over a 3 year period.
Before signing the contract, the compa-
ny had a total annual revenue of around
$5.5m
The company recently acquired two
communications companies, Frontier Inter-
net and iTexas, both located in Granbury,
Texas, giving it a further 1,800 customers and
$1.3m annual revenue, and additional cover-
age in the Barnett Shale region of North
Texas.
The company is now looking at offer-
ing services globally, with some of its exist-
ing customers who have operations in other
parts of the world, including in Egypt, South
America and Australia.
The company does not claim any pro-
prietary technology for the oil and gas indus-
try other than its CryptoVue security technol-
ogy, so other companies could in theory do
the same thing themselves, but “with our ex-
clusive contract with the world’s largest oil
36 digital energy journal - March 2010
order to get full business value from a digi-
tal oilfield deployment. Once again, send out
the call for experienced leadership to con-
serve the teams’ energy and keep expecta-
tions focused on both hills, one at a time.
Danger No. 8, “Lost in the Shuffle,” is
another example of coming to grips with
what workflow should be about i.e., more
than writing down Action Steps and insert-
and gas services company we feel we can do
it much faster and more efficiently,” says Dr.
H. Dean Cubley, CEO of ERF Wireless.
Drivers
Some of the biggest drivers for the growth
are drilling and fraccing companies, who pre-
fer the faster bandwidth and lower latency
they can get from wireless communications,
compared to VSAT satellite commucations,
Dr. Cubley says.
Typically on our terrestrial wireless
broadband they can get about 10 times the
data throughput for about the same price, he
says.
With the communications tools avail-
able, geologists and engineers can monitor
many different drilling / fraccing operations
simultaneously from their desks, rather than
go out to each individual well site.
Drilling and fraccing software is getting
more and more complex, and requiring more
and more bandwidth to connect the office
with the remote site, he says. “I would say
the software programmers are our best ally -
they generate the need.”
“The satellite based communications
links that have been used in the past are be-
coming totally inadequate to take full advan-
tage of these software platforms in real time.”
“Once they taste the increased band-
width it is very addictive – they will never go
back to a low bandwidth application after
that,” he says.
Some companies are also using the sys-
tem for communications directly with other
equipment, including remote monitoring, he
says.
The system
ERF Wireless owns a fleet of mobile broad-
band trailers with deployable towers ranging
from 50 to 100 feet in height that they deliv-
er to the drill or fraccing site, which provide
WIMAX and other wireless communications
ing new technology.
Companies need to allay fears that
workflow analysis represents reengineering,
job cuts and loss of security – that employ-
ees will not get lost in the shuffle with all the
focus on process and tools. Experienced
leadership needs to reassure employees that
DOF offers exceptional opportunities and al-
lows developmental ownership of solutions.
over a range
of up to 10-
15 miles
from the
trailer.
The
trailers are
moved by
ERF Wire-
less around
to wherever
the drilling
operations
are. They
just need to
be able to “Once they taste the increased
send mi- bandwidth it is very addictive
crowave da- – they will never go back to a
low bandwidth application
ta back to
after that,” - Dr. H. Dean
somewhere Cubley, CEO of ERF Wireless
where ERF
Wireless
has a fixed tower or other network coverage
eventually ending up with a Internet landline
connection – microwave communications be-
tween fixed towers in the ERF Wireless net-
works can travel up to 30 miles in one hop.
The company recently acquired a fur-
ther 321 mobile broadband trailers (MBT) at
a cost of $4.7m and is currently deploying
these units into oil and gas production re-
gions (around $15,000 a trailer).
Bandwidth available in the ERF Wire-
less networks can range from 30mbps to
165mbps, depending on customer needs and
what a particular backhaul is able to support.
Bandwidth available at the remote drilling or
fraccing location ranges from a single circuit
of 1.5mbps to multiple circuits up to five cir-
cuits.
The company offers various Service
Level Agreements of up to 99.9 per cent up-
time, and typical response times of 4 hours
or less. The network is continuously moni-
tored.
*(7$),50*5,3
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