FOCUS ON DATAMANAGEMENT - Digital Energy Journal · ATCE, Petex, Digital Energy ... treat it like...

B P - better data leads to better maintenanceS t at o i l - data management is not creativeE x xo n M o b i l - data management is a skillS h e l l - know your data qualityB H P B i l l i t o n - search for data using Google EarthB a ke r H u g h e s - manage your drilling knowledge

FOCUS ON D ATA M A N AG E M E N T

April 2007 Issue 6

dej apr-may.qxp 26/03/2007 20:53

Networks • IT • Services

It’s a wonderfulfeeling.The moment it all comes together.

When the right hand knows whatthe left hand is doing and you canaccess information across yourentire organisation.

BT can help make that happen with one converged networkspanning over 170 countries. This allows you to prioritise and sharethat information, wherever you are.

Feels good doesn’t it?

In the digital networked economy, BT’sworld-leading innovation enables expertgeoscientists and petroleum engineers to stay in the office while they oversee multiple operations in the field. This lowersexposure to risk and increases their value to the business.

To find out more visit bt.com/networked

dej apr-may.qxp 26/03/2007 20:45

April 2007 Issue 6

Digital Energy Journal is published on print 6 times a year, supported

by a free website and email news serviceWe cover information technology and communications in upstream

oil and gas production,drilling / completions and exploration.

Each issue of Digital Energy Journal is mailedto 2000 oil and gas executives, as well as

distributed at major trade shows such asATCE, Petex, Digital Energy

and Intelligent Energy.

Subscriptions: GBP 195 a year for 6 issues.To subscribe, please contact circulation

manager Katerina Jeffery on [email protected],

Digital Energy Journal, 213 Marsh Wall,London, E14 9FJ.

Alternatively you can subscribe online atwww.digitalenergyjournal.com

Front cover:The latest developments in modeling and simulation enable collaborative

decisions for a heavy oil project.Courtesy of Schlumberger.

Printed in the UK by

THE MAGAZINE PRINTING COMPANY

www.magprint.co.uk

Digital Energy Journal213 Marsh Wall, London, E14 9FJ, UK

www.digitalenergyjournal.comTel +44 (0)207 510 4935Fax +44 (0)207 510 2344

Editor Karl Jeffery

[email protected]

Technical editor/ IT managerKeith Forward

[email protected]

Consultant writerTracey Dancy, Paras Consulting

Production, design and circulationKaterina Jeffery

[email protected]

Advertising salesDavid Jeffries

Only Media LtdTel +44 (0)208 674 9444

[email protected]

ContentsExporation Software

Statoil and Landmark metered softwareOpeniT, the company which makes a system to measure how much software isused by the user hour, reports that the system works very well for Statoil andLandmark.

Neftex models entire Middle East / NorthAfricaNeftex Petroleum Consultants of Abingdon, UK,has completed a project to build a 3D strati-graphic (rock layer) model of the entire MiddleEast / North Africa region.

Questa and Roxar's Tempest simulator Digital Energy Journal spoke to John Campanella, senior reservoir engineer with Colorado mining and energy consultancy Norwest Questa Engineering Corp, about its use ofRoxar's reservoir simulator software

Managing your data - SMIDigital Energy Journal went to SMI’s information and data management conference in London on Jan 31- Feb 1 2007, for some in-depth discussionabout how to make data management work

Control and Equipment

Feasibility of well temperature sensing Shell did a project with LIOS Technology to assess the feasibility and economical added value of permanent downhole temperature sensing in both onshore and offshore projects in Brunei.

Making the digital oilfield workMike Campbell and Dutch Holland of US energy consultants Holland andDavis give their tips on how to manage a digital oilfield project - tip - maybetreat it like any other asset project?

ResmanUsing chemicals to detect location of water ingress

Honeywell’s Digital Oilfield PlatformJon Helsingeng, marketing manager for oil and gas Europe,Middle East and Africa, Honeywell, tells the story of Honeywell’snew system to use automation data

Production Software

Baker Hughes drilling information system cuts costs Baker Hughes has implemented an information management system for itsdrilling operations, which enables lessons learned to be recorded andretrieved by other engineers around the the company.

Bolo Systems 115 per cent annual growthColorado oil and gas accounting software company Bolo Systems reports thatit has grown 115 per cent in the past twelve months, comparing its 2006 rev-enues with 2005. This means it has more than doubled its revenues.

How service orientated architecture works Tracey Dancy of Paras Consulting explains how oil and gas companies can use service orientated architecture to get thelatest data in the right format whenever they want

Digital Energy conference previewOur preview of the Digital Energy Conference and exhibition inHouston in April 11-12

Evolutions in data management – IQPC reportDigital Energy Journal went to IQPC’s oil and gas knowledge managementconference in London, Feb 27-28, to find out the latest industry developmentsand thinking in the best way to do it

6

8

17

13

12

10

14

18

5

4

22

April 2007- digital energy journal 1

18

21

dej apr-may.qxp 26/03/2007 20:45 Page 1

3

Exploration software

April 2007 - digital energy journal

The IG2 client software runs onany Windows or Macintoshbased device and uses a networkof serversthat active-ly optimiseIP connec-tions toensure reli-able com-munica-tions. Thesystemallows forhigh-quali-ty video,

www.fieldpac.comUK data storage company EuropeanStorage Concept Ltd has launched anew portable data storage systemthat can carry up to 12 terabytes,called FieldPac. The system was specificallydeveloped for the seismicindustry, enabling crews to col-lect and store large amounts ofdata in the field, and quicklymove it to a processing centre.

A 'major player' in seismicdata processing has alreadypurchased the system, the com-pany says.

The whole disk drive packcan be removed on its chassisand transported to anotherdata centre for processing.

Portable 12tb data system

www.i-o.comNorway marine seismic contractorReservoir Exploration Technologyhas awarded a $29m contract toseismic systems specialist InputOutput, to buy its VectorSeis Oceansystem, which collects seismic datafrom the bottom of the ocean.

The system is redeployable(it can be moved somewhereelse after it has been installed)and gathers full wave (multi-component) data.

The system has enhanceddiagnostic capabilities, whichcome with its Gator commandand control software, made byInput Output's subsidiaryConcept Systems.

Delivery of the system isscheduled for the fourth quar-ter of 2007.

"Seabed acquisition is prov-ing to be a valuable and cost-effective solution for explo-ration and reservoir appraisalin areas having complex geol-ogy or high developmentcosts," says Chuck Ledet, sen-ior vice president of theMarine Imaging SystemsDivision at Input Output.

www.insors.cominSORS Integrated Communications,a Chicago-based software develop-er, has installed a network connect-ing field engineers, geophysicistsand other knowledge workers inthe Houston office to deepwaterdrill ships in Chevron's Tahiti andBlind Faith fields. The inSORS Grid IG2 enablespersonnel on each drill ship toconnect with real time collabo-ration rooms in Houston toquickly discuss and resolveissues and make timely deci-sions thereby helping to reducecostly delays.

RET $29m contract to Input Output

www.openspirit.comParadigm has joined Schlumberger,Shell Technology Ventures andChevron, along with existingOpenSpirit members, togetherinvesting $4m in OpenSpirit. This is the first time Paradigmhas invested in OpenSpirit.

Chevron's investment wasmade by its venture capital armCTTV Investments LLC.

OpenSpirit makes tools tolink together geoscientific data-bases and files, made in differentsoftware packages.

The announcement follows aMemorandum of Understandingmade by Paradigm to invest inOpenSpirit, agreed in April 2006.

The specific amounts eachcompany invested was not dis-closed.

John W Gibson, executive

$4m invested inOpenSpirit -Paradigm joins

chairman and CEO of Paradigm,has also joined the OpenSpiritboard, in connection with theinvestment.

OpenSpirit has also expand-ed its board of directors to makeroom for a seat for an independ-ent board member to beannounced shortly.

Following the investment,OpenSpirit plans to increase itstechnical and sales presence indifferent regions around theworld, as well as hire moreresearch and development staff.

Dan Piette, president andCEO of OpenSpirit, says that theinvestment represents a 'signifi-cant step' in the growth ofOpenSpirit.

Mr Piette is particularlypleased with Paradigm's invest-ment, which he says confirmsOpenSpirit's Vision that it shouldbe possible to create a systemfor integrating different dataand applications, completelyplatform independent, andbased on open standards.

Chevron installs inSORS collaboration system

OpenSpirit'sgoal is to helpgeoscientistsand techni-cians aroundthe world to

work together, without beingtied down to using products byany one vendor, because thesoftware helps them use differ-ent software products together.

OpenSpirit aims for a work-ing scenario when there are nofile formats which tie usersdown to specific software pack-ages.

"OpenSpirit has a provenrecord of allowing end users tobuild workflows that combineproprietary and third-partytechnologies," says HerbertYuan, IT and information man-agement manager for ShellInternational Exploration andProduction, and an OpenSpiritboard member.

The system is designed forrobust use, with a lifetime ofover 5,000 insertion andremoval cycles, compared to100-200 cycles for normal diskdrives with SCSI and SATA con-nectors, the company says.

The company claims thattransporting data on a physicaldrive can be more secure thanmoving it on a network.

The storage unit can fit in astandard 19 inch rack, takingup three units of height.

The system can replace tapeor multiple disk drive moduleswhich most companies current-ly use. The company says thatthere can be problems withtape, including damage during

transit and head alignment dif-ficulties between recording andreading drives. There are alsoproblems with multiple diskdrives, such as a low number ofdrives which can be used atonce and people mixing thedrives up. FieldPac gets aroundthese problems.

www.iconscience.comThe Ikon Science Training Centre isbased at the company's recentlyrenovated offices in London andhas space for up to 12 students in ahigh-tech computing environmentor up to 20 for bespoke lecture-based programmes.

The centre was opened inresponse to increased demandfor its RokDoc software pack-ages and will offer a selectionof software and discipline-based training courses, begin-ning with two-day foundationcourses on RokDoc andRokDoc-3D4D, with othercourse options to follow,including geopressure andanisotropy studies.

The company has alsoannounced the growth of itsglobal team with the additionof a regional sales manager forAfrica and the expansion of itsUK-based consulting geologistteam.

Ikon Science openstrainingcentre

Andrea Leech,support and training manager at Ikon Science'snew training centrein London

full-duplex audio, and real timedata collaboration over a low-bandwidth satellite connection.

FieldPac - a portable 12tb data storage system, designed for seismicoperations. Shown here is the diskdrive pack and the base station

Dan Piette, CEOof OpenSpirit

Chevron vis laboratory


Exploration software news

Statoil has been using the meteredservice since 2004, and since then hashad a "trusting and successful" rela-

tionship with Landmark as a result of usingthe metering, OpeniT says.

Paying for software by the hour is analternative system to paying for it by com-pany-wide license, or by the seat, or by theseat year.

Calculating software price by the hour isa controversial issue.

Some industry commentators believethat it makes more sense for a company topurchase software for a single negotiatedprice so that the whole company can use itindefinitely, and it is the purchaser'sresponsibility whether or not it is actuallyused.

However OpeniT believes that buyingsoftware by the hour can facilitate a moretrusting relationship between both parties.The buyer knows how much value thecompany is getting from the software (or

not), and the vendor has information abouthow the product is being used.

Of course neither vendor nor user ulti-mately benefits if the software is purchasedbut not actually used, and most of us areaware of situations when this has hap-pened.

Statoil and LandmarkUnder the terms of the agreement, Statoilpays Landmark for the use of itsOpenWorks geological data managementsoftware by the user hour, with an agreedminimum fee.

At Statoil, a wide area network licenceserver runs licenses around the world.Usage fees are determined from a negotiat-ed formula including list price, volume /commitment by customer, and meteredconcurrent users.

Landmark customers can use the infor-mation to make better decisions about thetechnology and its value to their business.

They can see who is using the tools, andwho might need more training.

Meanwhile Landmark gets a detailedview of customer usage for its sales andbudget planning. Landmark can evaluatehow well the workflow is working.Landmark also learns from the customer'suse of the system, and which features arebeing used. It can 'sunset' old tools.

Now Landmark has incorporated OpeniT LicenseAnalyzer in its portfolio of tools,to support pay per use license agree-ments, so the price can be incorporated ina bid.

Open iT reports that the conversionfrom standard to usage based licensingwent smoothly because of the guaranteedannual minimum commitment fee.

According to OpenIT, one of the rea-sons Statoil originally chose the Landmarksoftware was because it was open to theidea of a usage-based contract.

OpenIT says that its CIOs are increas-ingly aware of the idea of 'value based'purchasing of IT assets, and ask theirteams to measure and analyse their tech-nology usage.

"No longer is it easy to sell large pack-ages of software with a one-price model,"the company says.

OpeniT has offices in US, Norway andGermany. It has many worldwide oil andgas companies as clients includingMarathon Oil, ConocoPhillips, Anadarko,BHP Billiton, Statoil, Pemex, Nexen,Newfield, Gazprom and Hydro.

www.openit.com

Statoil and Landmarkmetered software - successfulOpeniT, the company which makes a system to measure how muchsoftware is used by the user hour, reports that the system worksvery well for Statoil and Landmark.


April 2007 - digital energy journal 5


The online database is called NeftexMENA (for Middle East / NorthAfrica). Users can subscribe to one

or both (Middle East / North Africa) areasof the model.

It covers an area of 8,000 x 3,000km,using data from 600 field depth maps and1,500 wells, over 150 regional cross sec-tions, over 600 field depth contours, and200 facies (rock) maps. It was built frompublicly available data.

Customers can use the system to seesource rocks, seals and traps.

The model is drawn at a 1km grid scale,so the model is big enough to enableexploration and production to be tiedtogether, but not so big that the time tomanage the models was excessive.

The system needs 4-16 GB of ram, 370GB of hard drive space and a high specifi-cation graphics card.

Many geoscientists and reservoir engi-neers already have computers with a speci-

fication above this, so they can all worktogether on the project.

The model is so large that it needs to takeinto consideration the fact that the earth isnot flat, creating new challenges.

The model was first released in February2006, and has been updated every monthsince then as new well data has beenreleased.

For many years, 3D models had only beenbuilt for single reservoir or a few neighbour-ing reservoirs, whilst maps (2D) had beenavailable for large areas. Neftex believes it isbreaking new ground with 3D models cover-ing an area this large.

Neftex is now aiming to incorporate moreinformation into the cube, such as depth sur-faces tied to wells, isopach maps (connect-ing points of equal thickness), depth / tem-perature maps and other modelling (eg car-bonate platforms).

Another 500 wells will be incorporatedinto the model over the next few months.

The cube was built by loading wells, sur-faces, maps and cross sections into the soft-ware; re-gridding the depth maps and tyingthem to the cross sections, fields and wells;creating isopach (lines of common rockthickness) maps, which display the strati-graphic thickness of the rocks; and thenchecking for consistency.

About NeftexNeftex Petroleum Consultants, founded in2001, specialises in making stratigraphicmodels for oil companies. Customersinclude BP, Chevron, Petrobras, Petronas,Devon, Shell and Statoil.

The company's specialism is being ableto interpret geoscience data sets (eg withdata about an outcrop, subsurface, drillingand engineering), and turn it into an inte-grated subsurface model.

The company provides online access toits rock models covering the Middle East,North Africa, the Black Sea, the GreaterCaspian and West Eurasia.

The models can connect together datafrom exploration and field developmentwork, and operators can link their own datawith Neftex data if they want.

Roxar The model was built using Roxar's IRAPRMS software.

For a model of this size to be built, itneeded the 64 bit computing capability ofIRAP and its scaleability, Neftex says.

But 64 bit computing and higher per-formance workstations has begun to makeit possible.

Neftex chose Roxar's software because itwanted a package that could quickly han-dle large amounts of data, without compro-mising any of it.

Roxar's IRAP RMS software has 14 soft-ware modules, including mapping, model-ling, planning and workflow management,which can be used together to make themodule.

One important tool on IRAP used tobuild the model was RMSwellstrat, whichcan be used to group wells together, createwell fence diagrams, view well paths andlog data in 3D, alongside other reservoirdata such as seismic, fault information andexisting maps.

Subscribers to RMSwellstrat will be ableto use this feature when they are workingwith the Neftex MENA cube.

Another software module Neftex madegood use of is RMSfaultseal, a fault sealanalysis program, which can analyse faultzone properties in a model, leading to agreater understanding of faults.

A view SE of Neftex's MENA Cube, North Africa in the foreground, Arabian Peninsulabeyond. Grid size ca 8,000km by 3,000km, with 1,000m increments

A Detailed View of Neftex's North Africa Cube (view NW to Hassi Messaoud, nationalboundary in red

Neftex models entire Middle East /North AfricaNeftex Petroleum Consultants of Abingdon, UK, has completed a project to build a 3D stratigraphic(rock layer) model of the entire Middle East / North Africa region.


digital energy journal - April 20076


Questa and Roxar's Tempest simulator

Norwest Questa Engineering recentlyused Roxar's Tempest simulator fora field in the Williston Basin, US mid

continent, for a US independent oil compa-ny client, who wanted to evaluateenhanced recovery options (air injection).

Questa used Tempest to build a reliablefull field model, so it could optimise highpressure air injection and optimise thesequence of a horizontal infill drilling pro-gram.

The project was started in spring 2002.At the end of the project, the oil companyfound that production and injection fore-casts matched the actual results at the endof the first year, even during transient (nonsteady state) operations.

The client's senior reservoir engineerhad used Tempest before, working for amajor oil company, simulating a carbondioxide injection project in West Texas.

As the only simulation engineer in thecompany, he couldn't afford to focus on asingle field full time, so Questa wasengaged to work closely with him.

The field had been discovered in theearly 1990s, and developed using openhole completions with mile long horizontalwells, with each well draining 640 acres.

The reservoir was 10 foot deep carbon-ate, with low oil saturation, driven by rockand fluid expansion.

Production had peaked in 1998 andbegun to plummet after that.

The company had been investigatingusing high pressure air injection and infilldrilling, using a field simulation model.

It was not possible to predict the reser-voir's production simply by drawing adecline curve, because it could not predictthe production rate in non-steady-stateperiods, when new wells were being drilledand wells changed from producers toinjectors.

It was necessary to use a reservoir simu-lation tool.

Questa used nine years of productionhistory and air injection information from aneighbouring field to calibrate the simula-tion model and achieve a history match. A

field just to the South had been injectingair for 20 years, and its data was used tocreate relative permeability curves.

The company thought it that air wouldsweep the reservoir more efficiently thanwater, and less expensively than carbondioxide, because the reservoir rock wastight and there was a low oil saturation inmost of the field, except at the boundary,when water injection was used.

The model was put together by workingiteratively with the client to clarify thereservoir geology, and tweaking the modelto account for water lost into the formationduring drilling, until a good history matchwas achieved.

After that, the simulation model wasused to optimise the timing and sequenceof infill drilling, and conversion of existingwells to air injection.

The production initially rose quickly atthe start, as new wells were being drilled at320 acre spacing.

As the wells were being converted forair injection, the production dropped, butthen rose again as the air began to sweepthe reservoir more efficiently.

The model was tuned and validated toreflect drilling and conversion activitythrough the fall of 2004, including 21months of high-pressure air injection.

Then, 12 months later, measured waterand oil production rates were comparedwith the forecast.

"The predictions and actual productionmatched almost exactly," says JohnCampanella, senior reservoir engineer withNorwest Questa.

"We're pretty proud of that, especiallybecause it was during a huge transientphase when things were changing rapidly. Ithink it shows what an engineer canaccomplish by properly using an effectivetool like Tempest."

Questa's client, who requested to bekept anonymous, told Digital EnergyJournal that the trickiest part of the simula-tion is "getting the early response rightwhen you're changing operations."

"You have to get a combination of fac-

tors correct in order to forecast produc-tion," the client said.

"By successfully predicting the responserates over that one year period, we're pret-ty confident we can predict the peak oilrate and ultimate recovery in this field."

Since 2005, three drilling rigs have beenactive in the field, and new infill wells arebeing drilled on 160-acre spacing.

Field development plans, which call formore than 125 horizontal wells and exten-sions by 2009, are driven by the results ofreservoir simulation with Tempest.

Current estimates based on the simula-tion model indicate field recovery willmore than double during that time.

Estimated primary recovery was onlybetween 8 and 10 percent of original oil inplace; now the client's company is predict-ing recovery of 24 percent.

In addition to high-pressure air injec-tion, they client is now investigating thepossibility of a hybrid air and water injec-tion program to further improve recoveryand reduce operating expenses.

The company is also using what itlearned in this project to set up simulationmodels for two older fields nearby, in orderto evaluate proper well spacing and planinfill drilling in the next year or so.

50 year old fieldIn another project, Questa was contractedto reevaluate an oil field which had beenproducing for over 50 years.

The company built a simple conceptualmodel, did a history match and ran thesimulation, and consequently demonstrat-ed that the water-oil contact was some 140feet lower than previously believed.

Questa identified a deeper target capa-ble of producing clean oil in a section pre-viously thought to be completely wet.

After the simulation, the well was deep-ened, and consequently produced 100 percent oil for nearly six months.

"This is the type of work people coulddo a lot more of, if they had the time and arobust tool like Tempest," comments MrCampanella.

Using Roxar's Tempest simulator to do a field model

- John Campenella,senior reservoir engineer,

Norwest Questa Engineering

Digital Energy Journal spoke to JohnCampanella, senior reservoir engineer withColorado mining and energy consultancyNorwest Questa Engineering Corp, about itsuse of Roxar's reservoir simulator software




Using TempestBoth Questa and its client have Tempestsoftware in-house, enabling them toexchange files easily and work togethermore collaboratively.

For both companies, the price of thesimulator was a key factor in choosingTempest, but its ability to model reservoirsusing black oil or compositional simulationalso was important.

"Coalbed methane is a big part of ourbusiness," says Mr Campanella.

"One of the benefits we see in havingTempest is that Roxar is continuouslyincreasing its functionality to handle morecomplex problems." They came out with amulti-component capability, so we canhandle cutting-edge techniques in ourCBM projects."

A lot of companies involved in CBMdon't use reservoir simulation, he notes,which often is a big mistake.

"We see tremendous losses in produc-tivity, especially when companies drill hori-zontal CBM wells without simulation. Somejust poke a lot of holes in the ground andhope.

"Often, one of two things happens.Either they drill more wells than they needto, wasting money unnecessarily, or they siton unproductive areas pumping water forway too long because they don't under-stand what's going on.

"CBM can be a very complex play-you'relowering the water pressure so gas willdesorb from the coal.

"If you plug the gas content and absorp-tion isotherm into a simulator along withhistorical information on pressures, youcan figure out exactly how to get gas outof the ground, how fast you can produce it,and what your peaks will look like. Somepeople try to do it with Excel, but that's notvery cost-effective.

"Questa consultants are currently usingTempest for black oil, compositional andthermal simulation, for a wide range ofprojects, including multi-componentcoalbed methane (CBM), tight gas reser-voirs and enhanced recovery operations.

"We do it easily with Tempest."Mr Campanella says he thinks reservoir

simulation should be done routinely onmany more oil and gas fields.

"Personally I think reservoir simulationshould be brought down to every engi-neer's desktop," he says.

"We need to push simulation out of theback room and into the mainstream wherepeople can use it on a daily basis."

"In addition to the big 3D projects, thereare a lot of existing fields where simulationcould be applied, but too often it getsskipped."

Many companies avoid running simula-tions for cost reasons.

"Most simulator licenses are priced toohigh for everyone to get access to whenthey need it," he says.

"Cost is a real big issue for smaller oilcompanies and consulting firms likeQuesta. It's extremely difficult to justify apackage that costs over $200,000, like sev-eral we've evaluated."

"Roxar offers a reliable, full feature simu-lator for a much lower cost," he says. "Thiscould be a way for companies to get simu-lation into the hands of more engineers."

"While other simulators may have morebells and whistles, Tempest does the jobefficiently and cost effectively on almostanything from small, conceptual models tofull-field coalbed methane models."

"From our perspective, it has been agreat investment and provides a solid plat-form for the type of clients we serve."

Mr Campanella notes that Roxar hasenhanced Tempest recently to includethermal recovery methods. "Roxar hasalways been extremely responsive to uswhen we have issues," he adds. "Theyalways get back to us in a timely fashion,and work very hard to make sure it's agood product.

"Not only is Tempest a robust tool forsmall companies like Questa, but becauseit can pretty much read and write anEclipse deck, I think the regional offices ofmajor oil companies could use it too, whentheir main licenses are all tied up. Roxar hassome very big Russian clients, I know."

About QuestaQuesta offers consulting services for oiland gas companies in its home territory ofthe US and Canada, and also has projectsin Australia, Western Siberia, Kazakhstan,Italy, Southeast Asia, China, Chile andColombia.

It provides services to do modelling ofcoalbed methane reservoirs, or large scalesimulations, for clients which do not havethe resources or manpower to do this bythemselves.

Developments at RoxarRaj Damodaran, a senior consultant withRoxar's technical services Group, says thatTempest has seen a lot of recent take-up inRussia.

"Tempest is the market leading simula-tor in Russia today," he claims.

"Oil companies have run models aslarge as 3.5 million cells with 11,500 wellsin Western Siberia.

"Tempest is strong in postprocessing, invisualizing 3D grids and simulation results,"he says.

"At present, it can easily handle up to 9million cells. But we're enhancing it to visu-alize up to 100 million cells in the nearfuture."

An integrated link with Roxar'sGeoModeling software RMS makes it veryefficient for users to set up the base case inTempest, says Mr Damodaran.

Users can take advantage of the outputsof RMS FracPerm - effective permeability orindividual matrix and fracture permeabilityarrays - and RMS Fault Seal Analysis - trans-missibility modifiers across faults - whichcan also be incorporated in the Tempestsimulation model," he says.

Roxar is also teaming up with leadingthird-party developers to offer uncertaintymanagement and accelerated historymatching with EnABLE software fromEnergy Scitech, and surface facilities andnetwork optimization with GAP softwarefrom Petroleum Experts.

A new generation parallel processingengine will debut very soon.

Questa Engineering usesRoxar's Tempest simulatorfor black oil, compositionaland thermal simulation inprojects ranging from multicomponent coalbedmethane (CBM) to tight gasreservoirs and enhancedrecovery operations




The conference focussed on theimportance of human factors, theneed to document the decision

process involved in data interpretation andthe importance of measuring the successof data tools.

A recurring theme was that of the keyimportance of middleware, sitting betweensources of data such as seismic surveys andwell logs, and the applications involvedwith presentation or storage of that data.

Middleware can act to assign metadatato each piece of information, providingbasic details such as date and location of asurvey for example, as well as importantinformation that can otherwise be difficultto discover, such as the significance of areservoir model; whether it is a final versionor a preliminary draft.

Assigning metadata can level the play-ing field between structured data comingfrom the wellsite and unstructured datasuch as emails and excel spreadsheets,allowing both to coexist in the same infor-mation system.

This makes it possible both to find infor-mation more easily whatever its originalsource and to store the data permanentlyin a format that is easier to maintain andmore useful in the future.

It was also generally agreed that thereneeds to be a culture of ownership of datawhere everyone in the company feels thatmanaging data is part of their responsibili-ty.

Many companies are creating data man-agement posts alongside engineers tomake sure data is given a high priority.

A common opinion was that one of thethings data systems are bad at is capturingthe logic behind a particular conclusion.

Although the outcome of a decisionprocess may be recorded, a new staff mem-ber trying to understand why a procedureworked will gain very little. There is a needfor data systems to capture the experiencebehind a decision.

A theme was the need to measure thesuccess of an IT project. There needs to bea way to associate IT with actual recoveryrates for instance, so that it is easier to seewhere to apply more technology andwhere staff expertise is more important.

John Shearn, SchlumbergerJohn Shearn, consulting manager withSchlumberger Information Solutions, talkedabout measuring the benefits of a visualcollaboration centre by making staff thatbook the facility enter an estimated value

reservoir engineers from the same compa-ny meet each other for the first time whenthey come to a conference," she said.

She said it is hard to optimise produc-tion unless you take a multi-disciplinaryapproach and look at the whole systemand how each part interacts, althoughdomain-specific workflows are the buildingblocks for increased efficiency.

Standards are a key enabler and shouldbe adopted by the whole industry.

Automated data access, display andreporting can save engineers time spenton mundane day to day activities, releasingthem for tasks where their expertise can beused more efficiently.

Talking about what will be the IT differ-entiators in a landscape where everyone isnow talking about data management, shesaid that predictive monitoring and pro-active analysis of data to identify futureproblems was the next step.

This could be achieved by bridging thegap between SCADA / real-time monitor-ing and reservoir data models, feeding livedata back into the model to update it.

Adeolu Olufemi Adeyemi, Brunei ShellAdeolu Olufemi Adeyemi, team leader E&Pdata management with Brunei Shell, talkedabout the need to spend less time lookingfor data and accessing and manipulating it,and more time analysing, interpreting andreacting to information.

The key challenge was in maintainingquality of data and ensuring the right datawas captured and available, he said.

Data is everyone's responsibility andthere is a need to define key roles such asData Definition Owner (e.g. DisciplineHead), Data Value Owner (e.g. AssetReservoir Engineer) and DataCustodian/Administrator (e.g. DataManagement team), he said.

Data should be treated with the samelevel of importance that HSE is given.

Shell uses a colour coding system, a traf-fic light scheme, to indicate to managersthe status of their assets in terms of dataquality.

This helps to stimulate conversation -they want to know why they got a red light- and it gives the necessary energy to thedata cleansing process.

Many data acquisition tasks can be per-formed automatically and the dataanalysed and fed back into control systemsto optimize production.

E&P workflows can be defined and auto-mated to perform simple monitoring, per-formance and risk analysis functions.

David Holmes, LandmarkDavid Holmes, information managementpractice manager with Landmark talkedabout the need for in-context integrationof information and the importance of soft-

for the meeting,based on theincreased produc-tion or cost savingsthat could beexpected.

Although thevalue is obviouslyonly an estimateand does not takeinto account thepossibility that the

same decision would have been takinganyway, this helps a company track thevalue of the installation.

Steven Comstock, ExxonMobilSteven Comstock Vice President, E&PTechnical Computing, Exxonmobil, talkedabout the need to take advantage of thecurrent high oil price to make the neces-

sary investment, butwarned that there isno 'tooth fairy' indata management.

Many companiesare moving from asituation wheremuch of their datais in emails or excelspreadsheets onindividual employ-ee's hard disks.

Moving to a cen-tralised data management store is a greatbenefit, but the data has to be properlymanaged to be useful, there's no way tomeasure success simply by volume of data,and the cost of storing and maintainingthe data has to be taken into account.

He said that while it is easy to justify thebenefit for financial data tools like SAP, onthe upstream side the case is harder tomake, managers ask, "Did Petrel reallymake the difference or was it our expertise,our judgement."

He sees a role for career professionalsthat focus on the IT aspects of geoscience,Exxon Mobil has defined a skill area fordata management, geophysical computingand others to emphasise the importance ofIT skills.

Donna Garbutt, SchlumbergerDonna Garbutt, production business devel-opment manager with SchlumbergerInformation Solutions, emphasised theneed for improving communication acrossdifferent disciplines.

"Sometimes production engineers and

Managing your data - SMI conference

Digital Energy Journal went to SMI's information and data management conference in London on Jan 31- Feb 1 2007,for some in-depth discussion about how to make data management work

John Shearn, consultingmanager, Schlumberger

Steven Comstock,ExxonMobil




ware vendors providing 'hooks' withintheir applications to enable seamless inte-gration of unstructured data.

He said that vendors got away in thepast with proprietary information systemsand now they compete over who is most

'open'.He emphasised

that security princi-ples must be strictlyapplied if a compa-ny is to have confi-dence in a system; itneeds to know thata search enginefunction will notreveal secure data.

Web services canbe an integral partof data manage-

ment but companies have to be sure that itreally adds value.

He said that while there are many stan-dards around, few of them come with animplementation guide and therefore theyare hard to implement in practice.

"There is a large portfolio of horizontalcommodity technology like Google searchand Documentum that can help solve thechallenges of the E&P community," he said."However, this technology needs to be cus-tomised to meet the needs of theupstream environment."

Nick Baker, PetrolinkNick Baker, director of PetrolinkInternational, talked about the challengesof capturing data from remote sites andloading it into @DITEP, Pemex's corporateE&P technical database.

Petrolink developed CADI (Collectioncentre for digital information) as a piece ofmiddleware that controls the flow of datainto @DITEP.

CADI assigns metadata to each individ-ual piece of data so that it can be moreeasily categorised and retrieved. Thisallows the system to produce detailedreports including information from differ-ent departments and disciplines and differ-

ent formats including emailsMr Baker said that one of the main

advantages they had was that the projectwas management driven.

This meant that personnel had moreinvolvement with the project and pushedit to succeed, although the solution was ahard sell at the beginning, because depart-ment heads felt that more transparencywould take away their ability to managetheir own data.

Executive reports were one of the mainpriorities and management quickly appre-ciated the ability to review data quicklyfrom an offsite location through anextranet.

Other priorities included HSE reports,offshore rig movements and planning, andthe ability to review well data much morequickly than previously possible.

Another tool that was proving popularwas an online 'help desk assistant' thatprovided instant messenger style access topeople working at the data centre.

The system is currently employed onone asset but will soon be expanding tothe whole of the north region of Poza RicaAltimira on the Gulf of Mexico.

Hatem NasrHatem Nasr, chief operating officer andfounder, VMonitor, talked about the diffi-culties of installing a remote wireless datamanagement system in Nigeria.

He emphasised the piecemeal way inwhich data systems are installed, ofteninvolving sophisticated tools for data col-lection or data interpretation, but withoutthe ability to move that data to where it'sneeded.

Vmonitor has developed small creditcard size devices that can transmit around5-6 miles in the bad terrain normal toNigeria offshore assets, or around 20 milesin good conditions.

Mr Nasr emphasised the importance ofmaking the devices easily concealable andself powering, as other projects had failedbecause of theft of easily spotted solarpanels.

Katya Casey, BHP BillitonKatya Casey of BHPBilliton presented aglobal search sys-tem based onGoogle Earth andPetroSearch thatintegrates tabularresults of the searchand a geographicalviewer. Althoughmost companiescondemned Googlebecause of theirlack of industry expertise, she said

the company had been able to providethem with help in setting up the system.

She said that the problems they facedwere that there was no common platformfor seamless data sharing between disci-plines and processes, no interpretationdata with an interpretation history trail andthere was a need to establish cross-disci-pline integrated workflows that could tracka project from new opportunity evaluationto execution.

Although they still relied on GIS for aworking tool where precision in spatialrelationships was needed, EarthSearch metthe needs of the majority of their petrole-um user group for a simple geographicbrowser working in accord with taxonomybased search for structured and unstruc-tured information.

The system uses fit-for-purpose data-bases including an ArcSDE spatial datastore rather than a huge data repository,and a taxonomy was developed to ensureconsistent data classification that can beused to translate between different appli-cations. The BHP taxonomy is also mappedto other industry standards such as POSCand PPDM for greater interoperability.

Ms Casey talked about the problems ofintegration between different softwareapplications, joking that sometimes itseemed easier to move a databasebetween two different software supplier'sapplications than between two applica-tions from the same vendor.

David Holmes, informa-tion management prac-tise manager, Landmark

Katya Casey, global appli-cations and informationmanagement lead, BHPBilliton.



Control & Equipment

Shell did a project with LIOS Technology to assess thefeasibility and economical added value of low-cost per-manent downhole temperature sensing in bothonshore and offshore projects in Brunei.

The aim was to come up with a lowcost way to design and implementpermanent downhole temperature

sensing on land and offshore wells.A lot of information can be gained from

temperature observations by DTS(Distributed Temperature Sensing), such asabout water or gas breakthrough.

In this trial in Brunei onshore and off-shore wells were fitted with a fibre optictemperature sensing system.

It was possible to monitor four separatefibres (i.e. four wells at once), with eachfibre cable up to 4km long, with a temper-ature reading of every 1m of the cable anda temperature resolution of 0.1 °C.

DTS technology generates a hugequantity of data, in this trial for a specificwell about 2000 data points were gath-ered every 30 seconds.

Longer measurement ranges (up to 16km are currently possible), better spatialresolutions (down to 50 cm) and shortermeasuring cycles produce even moremeasurement data.

Temperature data as well as DTS relatedback-scatter signals from the wells werecollected at predefined intervals and sentvia a back-bone to headquarters for analy-sis.

The data was formatted at the wellsiteand transmitted in encrypted and com-pressed WITSML protocol (WellsiteInformation Transfer Standard MarkupLanguage) based on POSC (nowEnergistics) Vers. 1.3.1.

Data from some of the onshore wellswere sent to Shell headquarters by Wi-Fi asthey were just 2.5km away.

Data from the offshore well was sent bya combination of Wi-Fi, microwave com-munications and fibre optic landline.

At Shell HQ, the data was received andinserted into a Shell developed DTS data-base, optimised to handle large dataarrays; the database can then be queriedby reservoir engineers or petroleum tech-nicians via a newly developed Excel plug-in and other visualisation tools.

Shell used the data to analyse how thetemperature profile along the well bore ischanging, and plotted graphs of tempera-ture against vertical depth in order to opti-mise production. The same informationcan help identifying problems with down-hole equipment, too.

Slow progressFor the past decade, per-manent optical in-wellmonitoring systems havebeen mostly high-end andcomplex completions,mainly deep-water wells,LIOS Technology says.

There has been a gen-eral hesitation to usingthe technology due tohigh cost of surface equip-ment, complex installa-tions and a lack of stan-dard tools for data gather-ing and analysis.

However, recentadvances in fibre opticshave made it possible toreduce the cost of distrib-uted temperature sensingsystems, and the develop-ment of industry stan-dards and electronics hasmade it easier to build aninformation architectureand get the information tothe production technolo-gist's desk.

But despite numerousreported early success sto-ries of downhole monitor-ing deployments withfibre optic sensors, forboth pressure and tem-perature, the big breakthrough in oil andgas is still awaited.

Still, with the latest developments pre-sented at IPQC the oil industry showsrenewed interest, especially in the area oflow-cost DTS systems.

In the beginning fibre has been lookedat with scepticism in the world of ruggeddrilling equipment and harsh offshoreenvironment but over time it managed notonly to be compliant but cost effective.

The initial hesitation was constantlyfuelled by typical teething troubles duringthe first commercial deployments, andrelease of premature surface equipmentwith unsatisfactory performance in termsof reliability, measurement stability andservice life.

LIOS Technology saw a similar pattern inthe business for fibre optics in fire detec-tion, which it is also involved with.

10 years ago people were mainly usingelectronic heat detectors mounted every10m, e.g. in a road tunnel. Now mainly fibreoptic temperature sensors are used.

The key success factors, especially inthis trial, have been a strong focus on tech-nology and a qualified industrial manufac-turing process, with an extensive test planfor every product leaving the factory.

Part of this is the compliancy with thePOSC standard which is pushed by severaloil companies such as Shell.

This results in robust and reliable prod-ucts.

The entire LIOS system has since beencomprehensively tested by many interna-tional bodies, looking at endurance inaccelerated aging environments.

Besides the oil filed application the sys-tems have been used (historically) for firedetection in road and rail tunnels, and inspecial hazard buildings, power cable /

Feasibility of well temperature sensing

LIOS surface equipment: DTS evaluation unit with integrated WITSMLconverter for encrypted data transmission to the office

Fibre optic sensor cable exits the well head



Control & Equipment

well-site to read the data; it can be meas-ured and sent to the office by Ethernet orWi-Fi, as shown in the discussed trial.

In a typical set-up the fibre optic cableis interrogated by a surface unit, whichthen sends the data to a central database,so production engineers can analyse it.

Interfaces are being standardised, both

for hardware and software.A new interface has been developed

by POSC (now Energistics) calledWITSML1.3.1.

The footprint and power consumptionof well-head readout units has changed,from being bulky cupboards to fittinginto an industrial standardised 19-inch

rack.A further improvement is that no PC

is necessary on-site as the communica-tion hard- and software based on anembedded Linux system is fully inte-grated into the DTS readout unit.

transmission line monitoring and industrialfurnace surveillance. There have been over1,000 permanent installations since 1997.

Ground communications One of the biggest recent changes lies inground communications. There is no longerany need for anybody to actually go to the

This article is based on papersby LIOS Technology and Shellat IQPC's Intelligent Wells conference in Kuala Lumpur,August 2006

Gathering temperature data to the surface

www.roxar.comRoxar has signed a joint venture withSONAR Limited of Nigeria to meet theincreasing demand in Nigeria andWest Africa for Roxar's reservoir man-agement and optimization solutions.The joint venture will be calledRoxar-SONAR.

Under the terms of the agree-ment,a service center has been setup in Lagos,Nigeria to provide salesand local customer support andserve as a training center for Roxar'sentire software portfolio.

SONAR is a full service companyproviding a wide range of servicesto the oil and gas industry,rangingfrom seismic data processing,andreservoir modeling through to busi-ness development activities.

www.advantechsatnet.comSaudi Aramco has awarded a contractto build a VSAT satellite communications network in SaudiArabia to Advantech SatelliteNetworks of Montreal.

The contract is for 'hundreds'of fixed, maritime and vehicleVSAT systems, which will be usedin the Saudi Arabian desert tosupport existing operations and

Aramco VSAT contact to Advantech

Roxar has made a joint venture withNigeria oil service company SONAR.Photo shows Roxar's CEO, SandyEsslemont (left) and Sona-Ari Jack,managing director of SONAR Limited(right)

Roxar and SONAR in Nigeria joint venture

Salem has made an agree-ment with location system ven-dor Ubisense to incorporate itslocation systems into its automa-tion system.

Ubisense can deliver dataabout the location of a person orobject down to 15 cm, which ismuch more accurate than othersystems, which are often basedon RFID, Salem says.

Salem says it tested a numberof different location systems butonly the Ubisense one was accu-rate and reliable enough.

The system uses ultrawideband (UWB) technology.

Track personneldown to 15cm on rigs - SalemAutomation

www.salemautomation.comUK oil and gas automation companySalem Automation has launched asystem which enables personnel'slocation to be tracked down to 15cmon oil rigs, and other locations whichrequire all equipment to be 'intrinisi-cally safe' (ie not having a highenough electric current to create aspark).

The system, called Salem S3PT,will make it possible to preciselydetermine how many people,and who they are, on differentplatform areas.

It can interface with heliports,to determine who is onboardspecific helicopter flights.

www.honeywell.com/psHoneywell has won a $13.5m con-tract with Dolphin Energy in theUnited Arab Emirates, to supply aManufacturing Execution System forDolphin's automation system forplant and pipelines.

The system help DolphinEnergy streamline its data han-dling, and provide betterchecking and reconciliation ofdata, and reduce manual dataentry.

As a result, Dolphin willknow a lot more about what isgoing on, which should help it

Honeywell UAE contract with DolphinEnergy

optimise processes andincrease production.

It will cover will coverDolphin Energy's entire gasproduction, processing and dis-tribution network, includingtwo offshore oil platforms inQatar's North gas field, onshoreprocessing facilities in RasLaffan, and an underseapipeline to Abu Dhabi andFujairah.

Honeywell will supply itsBusiness FLEX automation sys-tem, integrated with third partytechnologies.

AdvantechSatellite NetworksVSAT equipmentbeing supplied toAramco

exploration. It will be used forcommunications of both voiceand data. Saudi Aramco hasbeen using VSAT since 2001.

Saudi company Noviasat willalso be involved in installationand deployment of the system.

The system will use DVB-RCStechnology, which enables thesatellite bandwidth to be sharedbetween the different terminals.



Control & Equipment

Change management and the digital oilfield

Digital Oilfield (DOF) implementationshave a major handicap from thestart.

IT assets are still not treated by businessthe same as hard assets, eg drilling rigs ordownhole equipment.

For example, upon commissioning of adeepwater platform, what are the odds thatoperations will not begin immediately?Zero.

Yet, upon "Go Live" on many IT imple-mentations, will business users be preparedand the new system fully utilized? Time andagain, odds are 50-50 at best.

For all the millions invested, IT implemen-tation failures are accepted with only a "notagain…" shrug and no calls for accountabili-ty.

Why? Offshore platforms are "businessstuff" making money for the company, socompanies better be ready to fully employthem.

On the other hand, IT implementationsare messy and chaotic "cost stuff" -- clearlynot requiring a full speed ahead approach tobe ready for full utilization at "Go Live."

A different way to view ITThe challenge for companies desiring tomaximize their digital oilfield investments isto spend time and energy altering the waythey view IT assets.

Since they must "change the context" inwhich digital oilfield projects are beingimplemented, that will take industrial-strength Change Management.

Ten differencesSpecifically, what comprises the Top 10 con-textual differences between "hard assets"and "IT assets" and why should companymanagement be concerned?

Each difference can potentially result innot just a degraded digital oilfield imple-mentation but an outright, costly failure.

Decision point commitmentDifference No. 1 centers on pro forma com-mitment at the decision point.

When a new offshore platform is commis-sioned, its estimated volume is added to for-mal business projections for the scheduled"On line" date.

When IT projects are commissioned, pro-jected results are often omitted from thecompany's formal dollar projections eventhough there may be a "business case" thatincluded numbers.

The difference between a platform con-struction and an IT implementation is thatthe platform quite naturally embodies ahard asset mindset and the industry can rel-atively easily simulate system changes withresultant consequences.

Therefore, digital oilfield managers mustmake the business case as tangible andtransparent as possible and then reflect theexpected business result of the IT imple-mentation in the "official" business proforma.

A business committed on paper to deliv-

er results is far more likely to be ready tofully use an IT asset at Go Live.

Expectation of resultsDifference No. 2 revolves around a historicalbasis to envision tangible results.

Largely, digital oilfield IT implementa-tions are stigmatised before even figurative-ly getting off the ground, with manyemployees having only negative recollec-tions of IT implementations and that nega-tivity being very real.

Many companies have a woeful trackrecord in successfully implementing IT sys-tems that work, or actively used company-wide, or actually make money for the com-pany.

Breaking a string of implementation fail-ures only happens one way: managementcommits to slam dunk the next IT initiativeand each after that.

Failure to break the losing streak willsurely condemn many high potential DOFimplementations from their start.

Lack of accountabilityDifference No. 3 is especially stinging: lack ofaccountability for IT utilization in general.

While failure to use a non-IT asset wouldbe seen as insubordinate, unsatisfactory andpunishable by termination, failure to use (orlearn to use) IT assets, which typically arenot cheap, is not even a performance defi-ciency. Nor is a management failure to fullyprepare a business team for using IT assetsat "Go Live."

The solution is more than re-inventinglanguage.

Company Assets should be defined notjust as hard assets such as those at an E&Psite but all assets for doing the company'sbusiness including IT.

Concretely, this means that failure towring every possible drop of productivityfrom new IT implementation should betreated like failure to fully utilize a new off-shore platform.

PerceptionDifference No. 4 focuses on turning aroundthe stereotypical perception of an IT imple-mentation.

Unfortunately, that's no small task.If company personnel just thought IT

implementations had occasional, expectedglitches, the outlook for success might bebrighter. Not typically.

Instead management seems to considerIT implementations as messy and chaotic bynature and only completed in some shapeor form because workers supposedly "figureit all out."

Scrap "Easter Bunny" thinkingIn fact, it's well beyond time for oilfield com-panies to scrap that Easter Bunny happy-ending thinking.

Instead, provide an apples/apples harddollar comparison showing everyone why a

new, improvedapproach iscalled for.

On one side,calculate andmake transpar-ent the costsassociated withthe failure-rid-den "Let themfigure it out"way.

On the otherside, benchmark

successful implementations and employproven templates for both preparing the ITsystem for the company and preparing thecompany for the IT system.

Deliver expectationsDifference No. 5 is virtually astounding in itssimplicity: delivering clear top managementexpectations of full utilization of implement-ed IT systems/applications.

What CEO would feel compelled to telloffshore personnel he/she expected them tobegin using the new platform upon its com-pletion?

Yet, that assumed expectation does notapply with IT implementations.

Believe it or not, top management mustopenly state and reiterate the company'sintention to have all business units and allemployees fully utilize the new IT asset upon"Go Live."

Not personal propertyDifference No. 6 involves an issue thatshould not occur in the first place: personalcontrol at the desktop. As a component insuccessful IT implementations, the slateneeds to be wiped clean on a nagging work-force problem.

Users believe that their computer desk-top is theirs personally (like the family pic-tures in their cubicle), so they're not requiredto "get with the (overall) program."

This individual hijacking of a corporateasset should be unplugged at the earliestopportunity by strongly educating usersthat IT systems and applications are compa-ny assets accessed from a company desktop-- not their personal property any more thana valve on an offshore platform belongs to aroughneck.

The "invisible" assetContextual difference No. 7 is keyed to visi-bility / tangibility of the asset during imple-mentation.

Amid all the reasons why IT implementa-tions usually fail, one of the foremost is"invisibility."

Whether the new offshore platform isbeing viewed in a fabrication yard or duringits deepwater installation, it's an oversizevisual experience. Not so with IT.

When users get beyond seeing or pictur-ing desktops or maybe even servers, all back

Getting the digital oilfield right needs heavy duty change management. What is change management?Mike Campbell and Dutch Holland of Houston's Holland and Davis explain

Dutch Holland, CEO ofHolland & Davis LLC



Control & Equipment

The technology works like this.Slightly different chemicals areplaced in different places along

the well.

The chemical will send a few tracer mol-ecules up to the well head if it comes intocontact with water. It will not send up anymolecules if there is only oil in the well.

If tracer molecules are received at thewell head, they can be analysed, to workout which tracer chemical they are from.

By knowing where that chemical waspositioned in the well, you can work outwhere the water ingress was.

The chemicals are doped into plasticrods, which are attached to the productiontubing or sand screens (see picture), so it ispossible to know exactly where they are inthe well.

The system is potentially much cheaperthan downhole monitoring devices,Statoil says.

Resman - using chemicals to detect locationof water ingressStatoil Innovation has increasedits shareholding in RESMAN, acompany which is developingtechnology to find out wherewater is finding its way into anoil well, using chemicals.

A pilot project running 3.5 years beganin June 2005, with 9 different tracersinstalled in an oil well at the URD field, off-shore Norway in July 2006. The actual wellcame onstream in August 2006. A follow-upproject was started Autumn 2006 with ascope of finding better tracers, - easier todetect and more numerous. The project at18m NOK funding ($2.9m).

Statoil Innovation, a subsidiary of Statoil,is now the largest shareholder in Resmanwith a 42 per cent stake.

Statoil brought together the Foundationfor Scientific and Industrial Research at theNorwegian Institute of Technology

(SINTEF) and the Norwegian Institute forEnergy Technology (IFE) to set the compa-ny up.

RESMAN will test it out in a Statoil instal-lation - and then roll it out commercially.

"We're in dialogue with operators overlarge parts of the world, and the responsehas been huge," says Asle Jostein Hovda,investment manager at Statoil Innovation.

This is Statoil Innovation's seventhinvestment, since the subsidiary was creat-ed in 2001.

www.resman.co.uk

Plastic rods, soaked in a tracer chemi-cal, are attached to sand screensbefore they are put in the well.Thechemical has a slightly different com-position for each sand screen. If waterenters the well around the rods, atrace of the chemical will flow to thesurface, and it will be possible toanalyse which sand screen releasedchemical and hence where in the wellwater is entering the tubing

room workings may as well be completelyinvisible.

Given that absence of any visual stimulifor users, how do they get ready? Take the "connect the dots" approach.

That may include prototyping the com-pany's IT system, developing guided toursto see the new system at work (eventhough they cannot actually see the "gearsmeshing"), and/or preparing a robust com-munication "show & tell" program.

Help ensure that all employees have visi-bility of the upcoming digital oilfield appli-cation so that they can appreciate theirneed to thoroughly prepare for its dailybusiness use.

Lack of service providersDifference No. 8 involves dealing with thelack of a full spectrum of service providers.

In the oil industry, vendors have been inplace for decades to build new offshoreplatforms and to help prepare businessemployees to use them. And they have in-depth experience to handle the enormoustask and its complexity.

Unfortunately, the IT industry is notalways well-equipped to handle new ITimplementations with the level of vendorsupport needed to ready business person-nel for full utilization.

Fortunately, the solution is neither exoticnor impractical.

Oilfield companies should create transi-tion teams (from old to new IT systems) tohelp ease the changeover from a legacyway of doing business to the way businessneeds to be done with a new digital oilfieldapplication: IT's version of SWAT teams thatswoop in and work with users to best facili-tate success.

Clarify the strategyDifference No. 9 centers on failure to clarifythe company's implementation strategy.

Either top management will "select anddirect" a digital oilfield implementation (likean airline's management directs the use of anew flight procedure) or management willgive permission for a digital oilfield applica-tion's adoption (like management givingpermission to accept a new company insur-ance program).

Management's decision to fully use anasset for a business purpose leads to adeployment strategy.

Whereas, permission to try, assess orexperiment with an IT asset leads to only anadoption assumption with a stretch-out"normal distribution" acceptance.

For the solution, look no further thanproceeding to: clarify the business situation,get a management decision to direct or per-mit and then apply an applicable, provenimplementation model.

If management will accept a two-yeardiffusion experience until the entire organi-zation is using a digital oilfield asset, justgive permission to experiment, without fol-lowing with a direction to deploy.

Not assuming controlDifference No. 10 lands with a thud: failureof the business side to assume full controlof the IT asset and its implementation.

This downside occurs for a reason thatpractically that every computer user canidentify with.

GeekSpeak intimidates most people,resulting in nobody taking firm responsibili-ty and control of an implementation.

The solution is an absolutely essential

one, yet still goes down about as well as cas-tor oil.

Bring the business/IT alignment issuefront and centre, demanding that the com-pany's IT side speak the business languageand meet business/output requirements.

Heavy-duty Change ManagementWith these ten issues continually clangingtogether, heavy-duty Change Managementis definitely called for.

Employee attitudes about IT must bechanged to best ensure that digital oilfieldimplementations are successful and notdegraded or complete failures.

Picture a farmer's field.The dirt must bewell prepared or the seeds planted will notthrive.

Today's digital oilfield implementationenvironment is like the field that must beprepared for digital oilfield implementa-tions to have the best chance to thrive.

Heavy-duty change will be required inmany companies to correct contextual fac-tors that are limiting digital oilfield success.

Heavy-duty change management is notseminar-speak, it's the tool companies willneed to prepare the soil in reaping full digi-tal oilfield benefits.

Mike Campbell, PMP, is a ManagingDirector, and Dutch Holland, PhD, isCEO of Houston-based Holland &Davis LLC (www.hdinc.com/dof.htm ),energy management consultants formore than three decades who spe-cialize in technology implementation.



Control & Equipment

Solutions for improved knowledgemanagement are continuously devel-oping to give oil companies better

access to real time information.The visualisation of the information is

gradually becoming more advanced, help-ing the operation and business manage-ment achieve a clearer overview, which inturn enables them to make improved deci-sions.

However an often underestimated taskis how to organise the work to take fulladvantage of the information technologyand also the change management effortrequired to introduce new solutions.

Honeywell is one of the major suppliersof information management systems to theoil and gas industry as well as to otherprocess industries.

The strategy has been to deliver solu-tions covering the entire information chainfrom the sensor or transmitter in the fieldto the decision maker in the office, creatingvaluable insights for different functions andmanagement levels in the oil company.

A crucial part of this is to create mean-ingful information for the operators anddecision makers.

Production data combined with plan-ning data easily can visualise problem areasthat need action either from the processoperator or the reservoir engineer.

Tailor made Every oil field is different, with a differentnumber of wells, depth, pressure, produc-tion rates. There will be different challengesto keep up the production rate and toincrease the recovery rate.

Therefore a key requirement for aknowledge management system is thatsolutions can easily be tailor made. It mustalso be easy to make changes to during thelifetime of the field.

First of all the data collection, infrastruc-ture and repository must be robust andupgradeable in the future. The system mustbe able to take advantage of new techno-logy.

Software platformTo meet these requirements Honeywell hasdeveloped a software platform and suite ofapplications relevant for use on digital oil-fields.

It is called Production Control Center(PCC) and serves as the primary platformand user portal.

The framework is based on moderntechnology, utilising as many off the shelfcomponents as possible such asMicrosoft.Net.

Within the framework, Honeywell stan-dard advanced Business Flex solution set(for processes, assets and people) and oil

and gas specific applications are hosted asapplication plug-ins. This is also valid for3rd party applications.

The customer can take advantage of thebest that is available on the market and stillachieve commonality and structure.

The knowledge must be sharedbetween different locations (e.g.offshore,onshore) and the right informationmust flow between different work func-tions.

This is accomplished by using the com-mon code components for applicationsdevelopment.

The applications developed in theframework have a common "look and feel".All applications have the same standard formenus, report layout, export to Excel func-tionality.

The framework has also integrated secu-rity handling as a standard functionality.

Security access to all applications or spe-cific screens can be configured for all appli-cations, making the data available only tothe right people in the organisation.

Applications within the ProductionControl Centre use a common enterprisedata model.

This framework includes general func-tionality such as Common Data Model; datacollection and storage of data; visualisationof the historical data / reports; trending, tagexploring; generation and storage ofreports, automatically or on demand;export of reports or data to Microsoft Excelfiles; approval and digital signatureprocesses for data and reports.

To enable the easiness and flexibility theoil companies requires to further developuseful applications the framework providescommon libraries, base classes, infrastruc-ture for data handling and security, andguidelines for development.

All of these functionalities in the frame-work simplify development and mainte-nance of the applications itself.

The figure below shows a typical reportlayout from a North Sea platform showingsome of the functionality.

Operations Management suiteThere are a number of supporting tools toaddress visualisation, calculations, eventdetection and alerting requirements.

One example of such a tool suites isHoneywell's "Operations Management"(OM), an integrated suite of software whichimproves oil and gas clients work processes.

The overall Operations Managementsuite is derived from research of theAbnormal Situation Management (ASM)Consortium (www.asmconsortium.com),which for over 10 years has been investigat-ing causes of abnormal events and estab-lishing best practices process manufacturerscan employ to avoid or minimise theirimpact in different areas of operations.

Oil and gas clients along with Honeywellare founding members of the consortium.

There are several modular applicationswithin the Operations Management toolsuite.

The Alarm Configuration Manager (ACM)is one example. This is the master repositoryfor all limits and boundary you can operatethe process plant within. The limits caninclude monitoring of dry tree wells, sub-seawells, risers and pipelines.

The Alarm Configuration Manager docu-ments the source of limits, operator respons-es, consequences of deviations and mapsfacility limits to Distributed Control System(DCS) alarm values.

Also included are components for man-aging changes with access security andaudit trails.

Operations monitoringAnother example is the OperatingInstructions (OI) and OperationsMonitoring(OM) tools that provide function-ality for handling and monitoring operatingtargets that are changing. This is a typicaloperational situation on e.g. an offshoreplatform.

New targets can be created from scratchor by a model.

Operating Instructions communicateschanges to the operational plan. This couldbe new set points for choke valves or otheroperating targets.

The Operations Monitoring module mon-itors plant performance, against operatingmodels and summarises deviations.Deviations are passed on to the OperatingInstructions module where production oper-ators enter reasons of deviations.

Also, the Operating Instructions -

Honeywell's Digital Oilfield PlatformJon Helsingeng, marketing manager for oil and gas Europe,Middle East and Africa, Honeywell, tells the story ofHoneywell's new system to use automation data

A typical automation report layout for the North Sea

Jon Helsingeng, market-ing manager for oil andgas Europe, Middle Eastand Africa, Honeywell



Control & Equipment

Operations Monitoring set of modules pro-vide a history of previous shifts abnormalevents and instructions for returning oper-ators and supervisors.

This tool facilitates continuous coveragethrough software control and operatorinteraction for shift change procedures,escalation procedures, and communicationprotocols.

The operation managementoffshore/onshore can easily evaluate theproduction history and use these tools forimproving the production.

There are also more standard toolsincluded to handle knowledge betweenshifts such as Operator Logbook, Alarm andEvent analyst.

StatoilStatoil's Kvitebjorn platform, which isdesigned for minimum manning, has takenmany of these applications into use andthe information is also available at their col-laboration centre onshore.

Their approach has been to make surethat their work processes are aligned withthe technology available.

That leads to the next big challengewith regard to systems for improved knowl-edge management - how to implementthem in the organisation.

Change management Typical challenges during the first period ofoperation of an oil and gas platform is tomake effective use of all the informationmanagement system tools/applicationsthat are becoming available.

For new operators one their greatestchallenges is dealing with an ever morecomplex and turbulent information envi-ronment.

A relentless pace of changes, unpre-dictability and interdependence createsuncertainties. For oil companies to max-imise the growth opportunities of techno-logical advances, they need to develop thecapacity to integrate the technologicaldevelopments with the social component(people) of the organisation.

Previous experience has taught us thatimplementing new technology withoutdue recognition and management of thehuman and organisational dimensions canbe fatal. One should not underestimatewhat is required to use and maintain thenew technology.

If this is not well planned, implementa-tion of new technology can eventuallyresult in a limited realisation of the antici-pated and promised business benefits. Itcan even lead to safety issues if intended

work processes are not fulfilled.The three main deliverables of a change

management process or initiative are opti-mise acceptance, maximise readiness, andassure success of implementation.

Documentation for the ChangeManagement function includes the follow-ing:

What initiates a process and who isinvolved in the process; who is the stewardof the process, i.e. who is the process owner(champion) with the responsibility for mak-ing sure the process is completed properly;when the process takes place, i.e. if thereare scheduled activities

What sources of information are neededas input to the process; how the processobtains input information; what activitiesoccur along the process path.

Who conducts or oversees the activities;what communications or interactions arerequired with other processes; whatapproval structure is in place for each stepin the process.

What is the output of the process; wherethe process output is distributed (e.g. stor-age of information or documents, mes-sages and alerts produced); what com-pletes the process execution or pause ituntil the next iteration.

www.saudiaramco.comSaudi Aramco and WellDynamics, aleading provider of intelligentupstream completion technology,are jointly developing a range of newtechnologies for multizone, multilat-eral intelligent completions.

The project consists of thedevelopment of a telemetry sys-tem coupled to a subsurface con-trol module which will controlflow and transmit data from andto each "smart" lateral to themain bore, and ultimately to thesurface.The system reduces tech-nical risk by taking advantage ofWellDynamics' SmartWell prod-ucts for basic monitoring andflow control functions within thelaterals.

"This joint development proj-ect is part of Saudi Aramco'soverall vision to develop ExtremeReservoir Contact (ERC) wells,"said Amin Nasser,Vice Presidentof Petroleum Engineering &Development, Saudi Aramco."ERC wells are intelligent multilat-eral wells that do not requireindividual control lines from thewellhead to each lateral or zone,and therefore, theoretically allowan unlimited number of intelli-gent laterals," added Nasser.

Saudi Aramco claims to havepioneered intelligent MaximumReservoir Contact (MRC) wells,which attain more than 5 km ofcontact with the reservoirthrough intelligent laterals offthe main wellbore that can bepartially or fully opened andclosed from the surface. SaudiAramco's most recently devel-oped field, Haradh Increment III,completed in early 2006 with aproduction capacity of 300,000bbls/day, relies on 32 intelligentMRC wells that useWellDynamics' SmartWell intelli-gent completion technology.

"Intelligent MRC wells canonly have a limited number oflaterals (four to five), becauseeach downhole control valverequires a mechanical controlline to the wellhead. ERC wellswould relax this requirement.Weenvision ERC wells of fifty to onehundred smart laterals thatwould efficiently drain the reser-voir and ultimately maximizeeconomic recovery," explainedMuhammad Saggaf, Manager ofSaudi Aramco's EXPEC AdvancedResearch Center (ARC).

Saudi Aramco and WellDynamics join todevelop new technologies

www.iridium.comHandheld satellite communicationssystem Iridium has unveiled its plansfor its next satellite constellation,which will cost $2bn to construct anddeploy.

Iridium describes its key mar-kets as the maritime, aviation,government/military, emer-gency/humanitarian services,mining, forestry, oil and gas, heavyequipment, transportation andutilities.

Iridium's annual earningsbefore interest, tax, depreciationand amortisation are currently$60m, which indicates that a fairproportion of the investment willnot be financed from the compa-ny's current earnings.

Iridium says that the remain-der will be sought from externalinvestors, including the capitalmarkets and strategic businesspartners.

The new satellites promisehigh bandwidth data and shortmessaging services as well asvoice. It will have an IP basedarchitecture.

The satellites will be able tocommunicate with other satellitesystems, and Iridium will retain itstechnology of having databounced from satellite to satel-lite, rather than just from groundto satellite and back.

Iridium has also recentlyinvested in new ground stationsin Fairbanks, AK and Svalbard,Norway.

Iridium plans for next satellites

Roxar secures downhole monitoringcontracts in Middle East www.roxar.comRoxar has signed two multi-million US dollar contracts tosupply 43 dual downholegauge PDMS (PermanentDownhole MonitoringSystems) to a leading MiddleEastern operator for deliveryby October 2007.

The Roxar downholeHM gauge transmits digitized pressure andtemperature data to thesurface and is a keycomponent of RoxarPDMS. Roxar's downhole monitoring system



Production software news

Holly Corporation wanted tobe able to integrate its tradingand risk management systemwith its back office system, so thatit could use real time (live) datawhen doing financial valuationswith physical movements of oil.

Another project was with thedigital oilfield, where SAP andAccenture worked together tocreate a system which could beused to help speed up drillingwells and manage the mainte-nance.

SAP worked with Implico todevelop a software tool to man-age downstream (road) distribu-tion, which could make sure thatpetrol stations don't run out ofpetrol and road tanker utilisationis optimised, in the face of chang-ing sales volumes and prices.

"Achieving leading-edge inno-vation requires the input of morethan one business entity and ITvendor," says Bob Martin, SAPintegration project manager,Conoco Phillips and chairman ofthe SAP Oil & Gas Global IndustryAdvisory Council.

"We see promise in thisapproach to enable us to increaseour productivity and supply chainperformance, lower total cost ofownership and provide a newlevel of interoperability and stan-dards."

SAP creates 8th oil and gas industrygroup

SAP has put together its 8th oil andgas industry group, to work togetheron creating new oil and gas softwaresystems.

Oil companies in the networkinclude Conoco Phillips, HollyCorporation, Petrobras, Statoil andTesoro.

Vendors in the network includeAccenture, HP, IBM, Implico, KSS,LogicaCMG, Meridium, NRX,Quorum Business Solutions,TechniData,Triple Point andVendavo.

SAP has similar networks inother industries it serves, includingbanking, chemicals, consumerproducts, high tech, retail, publicsector and forest and paper.

Specific oil and gas projects thegroup is working on include devel-opment tools for integratingexploration and production, landlease management, real time gasallocation management, asset life-cycle management, distribution /terminal management, commodi-ty trading and price optimisation /margin management.

One project which has alreadygrown out of the community is atrading and risk management sys-tem, developed by SAP and TriplePoint Technology for petroleumrefiner / marketer HollyCorporation.

www.sismarine.comSingapore drilling contractorFrigstad Offshore has bought a fleetmanagement software system fromStar information Systems.

It will install Star's CentralisedPurchasing System (CPS) in itshead office, then roll it out on itsdrilling rigs world wide.It will also implement Star'sInformation and PlanningSystem, which includes aplanned maintenance systemand a safety management sys-tem.

Dag Frigstad, administrationmanager with FrigstadOffshore, says that he choseStar due to its "high perform-ance, ability to scale the solu-tion, their spirit of entrepre-neurship and innovation.

"They are strong on productdevelopment, strong on deliv-ery and strong on customerservice. They know the impor-tance of following up a rela-tively small customer," he says."We like to use reliable supplierswith a good track record. SIS

already has a good portfolio ofrig customers, and we havealready seen - by the speed withwhich they have gotten the sys-tem up and running in ouroffices - how quick and service-oriented they are."

Four new consultants at Paras

Knowledge Reservoir version 2.5 of Gulf of Mexico knowledge base

www.paras-consulting.comOil and gas IT consultancy ParasConsulting has employed four newconsultants.

Michael Woodward joinsParas Consulting fromCapgemini, with experience onmanaging complex projects.

Phil Challis has experiencebuilding relationships betweenbusiness and IT, developing a cus-

www.knowledgereservoir.comHouston oil and gas engineering con-sultancy Knowledge Reservoir hasreleased version 2.5 of its internetknowledge base of Gulf of Mexicodeepwater reservoir performance.

The knowledge base hasdetailed information about 63mature oilfields, including 314reservoirs and 353 wells. Datafor 50 new fields is included inthe latest version. There is infor-mation about all deepwater reservoirs either in

Frigstad Offshore uses Star software

Hydro invests in Norwegian database technology

www.sharecat.comHydro is investing NOK 22 million inthe Norwegian company Tektoniskand its ShareCat database technology

ShareCat is used by a numberof international oil and gas pro-ducers to share informationbetween suppliers and subcon-tractors.

ShareCat provides operators,suppliers and subcontractors withaccess to information aboutequipment on oil and gas installa-tions.The technology is internet-based and enables all the partici-

production or ready for development.

It provides information aboutreservoir performance, metrics,analogs, lessons learned andregional knowledge.

The knowledge base is usedby oil companies and their part-ners operating in the Gulf ofMexico. Knowledge Reservoirsays that its clients have foundways to improve productivity andimprove their processes, as aresult of information in theknowledge base.

Dag Frigstad, administration manager,Frigstad Offshore, next to a model ofthe S/S Frigstad Oslo - the world's mostpowerful drilling rig, due for delivery in2009, which will use Star InformationSystems fleet management software

tomer service culture and intro-ducing streamlined manage-ment processes.

Carol Dye was previously anindependent consultant. She hasa background in both oil and gasand pharmaceuticals, with skillsin project management, analysisand change management.

Vicky Garrard is a geophysi-cist, who was previously arecords management consultantwith Tribal Technology.

total cost of ownership andprovide a new level of interoper-ability and standards."

pants in the supply chain toobtain and deliver informationfrom a shared location.

Tektonisk is based in Bergenand also runs offices in Stavangerand London.The company hassigned agreements with a num-ber of operators on theNorwegian continental shelf inrecent years and ShareCat hasbeen used in connection withthe Ormen Lange development,for which Hydro is operator.

www.sap.com/industries/oil-gas/index.epx

ShareCat's management team. Trond Even Dagsvik (CEO),Dag Pettersen (MD), and Knut Dagsvik (director)



Production software

An oil company client of Baker Hugheshad a problem when drilling offshoreBrazil. It wanted to work out how it

could clean the holes more efficiently andremove cuttings to optimise drilling speedand subsequent casing operations.

To try to find a solution, during drillingplanning, one of Baker Hughes' engineerslooked up the company's information man-agement system, and ran a search under thecriteria well type = extended reach; wellboreinclination = 45 to 80 degrees; bottomhomeassembly = rotary steerable; and problem=hole cleaning.

From the search, the engineer found 11lessons from similar drilling environments inthe North Sea, West Africa and South EastAsia.

There were reports on a number ofdriling failures, caused by drilling too fast forthe available mud flow rate. This resulted inreduced hole cleaning efficiency, leading tostuck pipe and a bottomhole assembly get-ting lost in the hole.

There was a well documented solutionfor the problem - the control the rate of drillpenetration, so there would not be excessivebuild up of cuttings between the drill bitand the hole (annulus).

After analysing these lessons, for the off-shore Brazil project, the engineer recom-mended a drilling plan that would matchthe rate of penetration of the drillbit to theavailable mud flow rate.

This would reduce lost time, and ensuregood drilling speed, logging and casingoperations.

By implementing the plan, drilling timewas reduced by 70 per cent, 65 per cent and

35 per cent in each hole section, BakerHughes reports.

Application Knowledge StoreThe aim of Baker Hughes' system, calledApplication Knowledge Store (AKS), is toenable re-use of previous experience,repeating past successes and avoiding pastmistakes.

Drilling engineers can find informationon the web about lessons learned and per-formance achieved, in a drilling environ-ment similar to the one they are currentlyworking on.

Information can be retrieved in variousways. This includes regular knowledgeupdates sent to the whole company, orupdates about specific types of drilling sentwhenever they are available.

Users can quickly search for informationthey want, eg by searching for location,operator, field or knowledge category.

So for example, they can find the answerto questions such as, "“What do we knowabout drilling hard, 20,000 psi uniaxial com-pressive strength limestone formations withseven-bladed polycrystalline diamond com-pact bits on rotary steerable assembliesusing oil-based mud?”

If an engineer is working outside hisrealm of expertise, he can quickly obtaingood documentation about how to drillthere.

Contributing informationEngineers are encouraged to contributeinformation, if they want to add knowledgeor understanding gained through their

experience.They can write lessons about potentialproblems, giving information about previ-ous operating practises, and recommenda-tions of how to overcome problems.

For documentation of lessons to beincluded in the system, they must containinformation which is significant, valid andcontains reusable performance related totechnical information.

Once a technical lesson has been submit-ted, a team of drilling optimisation expertsreviews it, before it is agreed as part of thecompany knowledge base.

The reviewing team can check the sub-missions are solutions to valid problems,written in a style which someone unfamiliarto the situation can understand.

The lessons learned are categorisedusing a sophisticated taxonomy, so they canbe quickly retrieved later by people whoneed them.

OASISThe service is part of OASIS, Baker Hughes'engineering and consulting service fordrilling.

In OASIS, drilling specialists are drawnfrom across the company to evaluate diffi-cult drilling situations.

They can study data from neighbouringwells (offset) and investigate the conditionsunderground, so they can put togetherdrilling plans.

They make a detailed analysis of thewhole drilling system and wellbore environ-ment, and try to predict problems whichmight occur.

Baker Hughes drilling information system cuts costsBaker Hughes has implemented an information management systemfor its drilling operations, which enables lessons learned to be recorded and retrieved by other engineers around the the company.By Phil Perry, Knowledge Systems Specialist, Hughes Christensen

Phil Perry, KnowledgeSystems Specialist,Hughes Christensen

receive the latest news and feature articles in your inbox every Monday

Sign up to our free e-mail newsletter at www.digitalenergyjournal.com


production and land management, whichhave been spliced together in ways whichdo not always work very well.

This leads to reduced productivity, mis-communication, limited access to data,restricted choices, restricted scaleability ofthe system, and difficulty complying withregulations, such as Sarbanes-Oxley.

A recent new client was EnerVestManagement Partners, a Houston companywhich operates11,000 wells acrossthe US.EnerVest is continu-ously purchasingnew wells, andwanted anaccounting systemwhich would makeit easy to add new wellsto the system and pro-vide a range of differentreports.

Bolo Systems wasfounded in 1992 by oiland gas accountantswho were frustratedwith the software theywere using and thoughtthey could do it better.

The company servesmainly what could beconsidered the 'mid-tier'oil and gas companies -not the largest ones orthe smallest ones - witha large installed cus-tomer base in the US.www.bolosystems.com

digital energy journal - April/May 200718

Production software

The challenge facing both oil compa-nies and service companies is to finda sustainable integration solution for

multiple sources and types of data.The acquisition, storage and access

capability of data at every stage of theexploration and production process has tobe high on the priority list of any produceraspiring to enhance capacity.

All oil companies have existing technol-ogy, which to a certain extent works andallows at least limited access to and manip-ulation of data.

The challenge is often that multipleapplications are needed to access different

data types, and the majority of these appli-cations do not interact, despite beingdesigned in many cases by the same vendor.

Processes are built around existing appli-cations and datasets, many of which include“workarounds” to deal with the challengesof extracting, transferring and loading datafrom one application to another.

All too often we are forced into a linearprocess and loose the richness in analysisthat would occur if we allowed faster feed-back loops and more iterative processes.

The lack of “one for all” integration sys-tems is a challenge that is increasinglystretching the industry to look at new and

better solutions, which, considering the lackof standards in data storage, are having tobe created as bespoke solutions on a com-pany by company basis.

Clearly, for now at least, there is no onesolution that will suit everyone.

Inherited data stored on paper, on oldtapes and even some digital storage isincreasingly difficult to access and manipu-late, and much valuable information is lostas media, now ancient in “Oil Age” terms,degrades.

Market leaders in software develop-ment, while declaring their openness andtransparency, are still currently developing

How service orientated architecture worksTracey Dancy of Paras Consulting explains how oil and gas companies can use service orientated architecture to get the latest data in the right format whenever they want

This means it has more than doubledits revenues. 2005 growth was evengreater, 150 per cent compared to

2004. CEO Rick Slack attributes the remark-able growth to oil companies spendingsome of their recent healthy earnings onlooking at ways to optimise their internalprocesses.

Another driver for the growth is execu-tives increasingly wanting to have the bestpossible picture of how their company isperforming day by day, continuously track-ing production, revenue and expensesagainst the budget, rather than wait formonthly accounts. Sarbanes Oxley has alsoencouraged executives to spend more timelooking at their accounts.

Oil and gas operations are also becom-ing increasingly complex, due to the largeamount of asset trading which is going on,and companies often pursuing smallerreservoirs.

Many oil and gas companies have put alot of effort into integrating their geophysi-cal and geological systems, and are nowmoving their focus onto integrating theiraccounting systems, he says.

The company builds 'executive dash-board' tools into its software, which cansupply executives with the most importantinformation about how their company isrunning at a glance.

Clients include Energy Partners (EPL) inNew Orleans, Energy Resource Technology

PetroAcct , Legend Natural Gas II,Petrohawk and J.M. Huber.

The company has observed that manyoil and gas companies are using a patch-work of different databases for accounting,

Colorado oil and gas accounting software company Bolo Systemsreports that it has grown 115 per cent in the past twelve months,comparing its 2006 revenues with 2005.

Bolo Systems executive dashboard - see how well your company is runningat one glance

Bolo Systems-115 per cent annual growth

“Many oil and gas companies have put a lot of effortinto integrating their geophysical and geological systems, and are now moving their focus onto integrating their accounting systems”, Rick Slack says.

Rick Slack, CEO,Bolo Systems



Production software

applications that neither solve the issue norenable even in-house applications to com-municate.

Meanwhile the need to access integrat-ed data is becoming more urgent everyday.

Many oil companies are creating theirown in-house solutions, working with serv-ice companies on integrated applicationsthat attempt to solve at least part of theproblem.

Some are even looking outside of theusual industry providers.

People are developing Google-type seekand search type applications, without theneed for adding expensive and time-con-suming metadata tags.

However, even more recent applications,designed with metadata capability, strug-gle to search through historical data – inparticular the capture of discussionprocesses that led to decision makingbased on older models in the first place.

These discussion processes lead on toanother valuable source of data not cur-rently being fully exploited is experience.

Custom built solutions are creating theirown problems.

Energistics, previously known as POSC –the Petroleum Open Standards Consortium– feel, as many do, that the only way for-ward in building integrated solutions is tohave clearly defined standards, accepted

industry-wide.Everything from UWI (Unique Well

Identifiers) to flagging reservoir modelswould have distinct and unique namingstandards, which ultimately could trans-form the exploration and production com-munity. A key part of the solution that serv-ice companies should seek to provide is tohelp companies implement industry stan-dards.

Service Orientated ArchitectureThe model of Service OrientedArchitecture, a phrase increasingly beingheard in exploration and production datamanagement circles, changes the philoso-phy of integrated solutions through the useof a Service Bus – a concept which appearsat least for now to overcome many datamanagement issues.

As a concept it appears to solve many ofthe problems outlined here – a central“tank” for putting data in, with streamlinedapplications for accessing a whole varietyof datasets. We see SOA as an increasinglyexciting and sustainable solution, andwatch the development of these solutionswith great interest.

Without standards, individual companiescan only look to find the solution thatworks best for them, in many cases a “bet-ter than nothing” but far from perfectanswer.

Tracey Dancy ofParas Consulting

About Paras Consulting

Paras Consulting is aglobal managementconsultancy providinghard-hitting perform-ance improvementsolutions to theupstream oil and gasindustry.

Paras consultantshave a variety of sen-ior-level experienceincluding E&P strategyformulation, produc-tion enhancement,exploration perform-ance, subsurfaceprocess improvementand information / datamanagement.



Production software

Digital Energy conference previewOur preview of the DigitalEnergy Conference and exhibition in Houston in April 11-12

The Society of Petroleum EngineersDigital Energy Conference (no relationto Digital Energy Journal magazine) will

be held in Houston on April 11-12 at theGeorge R Brown Convention Centre.

The theme of the conference will be howdigital tools can help the oil and gas industryas it goes through something of a transitionperiod with a growth of national oil compa-nies and countries as primary operators.

The globalization of the industry, andgrowth in multiculturalism of the workforce,creates its own IT challenges.

Meanwhile developments in IT areexpanding the capability of engineering,geologic and commercial business processes,with more communication, collaboration andaccess to knowledge.

The conference will address making betteruse of data to improve decision making; thechanging workforce and new ways of work-ing; using technology to find hydrocarbonsin increasingly hostile and difficult condi-tions; and IT security.

There are four luncheons about emergingtrends, covering predictive analytics, produc-tion monitoring, high performance comput-ing and the ‘energy renaissance’ (industrytransition).

The program committee is Paul Miller ofHalliburton (chairman); Ron Cramer of ShellGlobal Solutions; David Feineman of BPAmerica; Russell Borgman of ConocoPhillips,Ekaterina Casey of BHP Billiton, MurthyDivakaruni of L&T Infotech, Joe Corrales of

ConocoPhillips, Jim Crompton of Chevron,Michael Donovan of Schlumberger, PhilippeFlichy of

Globalogix, Leah Smith of Pogo ProducingCompany, Jeffrey Pferd of Petris Technology,Amy Price of

Petris Technology, Sherri Rogers ofHalliburton Energy Services Group, andMichael Strathman of Aspen Technology.

Key speakers include PhirozDarukhanavala, Vice President and CTO,Group Digital Business, BP; Gary Masada, ITCompany President and CIO, Chevron; DonPaul, Vice President and CTO, Chevron.

Exhibition Open iT Inc will demonstrate its softwarefor optimising enterprise IT resources. Thesoftware meters, analyzes and optimisesusage, and gives management an overviewof which IT assets are being used, by whom,and for how long. www.openit.com

WellEz will demonstrate its online serv-ice to gather well and rig reporting data.

Data can be entered into forms on therig site, and then submitted to the shoreserver. You do not need to have an alwayson internet connection to submit the data.

The data is held in a central server andSQL database, which is managed by WellEz.

Users can draw reports, charts, graphs,plots and tables, by bringing the data intoMicrosoft Excel.

WellEz can incorporate a client's owndrilling report format into the system, andclients can also access over 20 genericreports.

The company promises to provide oper-ations reporting as a service, rather than aproduct. The system was recently rewrittento run on Microsoft.NET platform.www.wellez.com

NuTech Solutions will exhibit its soft-ware tools for upstream predictive analyticsand intelligent decision support.

The software can been used to optimisedrilling programs, automate model historymatching, to predictive analytics on wellcompletions, optimise capital porfolios,schedule production, optimise enhancedrecovery, plan workovers, and forecastdrilling and completions activity.

The company is a bronze sponsor of thisyear’s event, and will be providing pens andnotepads and participating in the predic-tive analytics panel.www.nutechsolutions.com

Intervera Data Solutions will exhibit itsDataVera software tools to help managedata and ensure it is complete. Its softwarecontains thousands of re-usable rules andsolutions that can be used to clean up data,including preliminary data profiling, auto-matic cleansing and correcting, to largescale data consolidation, and real time dataquality monitoring. It will have live demon-strations on its booth.

The company, together with VolantSolutions, will demonstrate a new way of

managing data quality as it moves betweencritical master and project data sets, anapproach the company calls‘Integration+Quality architecture’.

Intervera will also co-present a whitepaper “learning to trust your data – realtime quality integration for E&P profession-als.” www.intervera.com

SWORD will exhibit its C2Share onlinedocument control system for the oil andgas industry, designed for complex proj-ects. The software has special functionalitydesigned to control the complex informa-tion flows typically found in a project envi-ronment.

The software enables a ProjectDocument Controller to control the flow ofdocuments between contractors and inter-nal staff, to monitor documents review,approval and sign-off process. The ProjectManager can immediately see the status ofproject documentation and spot bottle-necks / risk areas.

Information can be accessed from all ofthe different sites by authorized users, sothere is only one version of each documentin circulation. www.sword-group.com

p2 Energy Solutions will exhibit itsAllocation Process Modeling (APM) applica-tion, for oil and gas companies to accurate-ly allocate product to the appropriate par-ties. The system uses recent improvementsin measurement technology and informa-tion management to enable the allocationsto be more rigorous and faster than in thepast. An unlimited number of componentscan be tracked in mass, volume or energyusing any desired engineering unit.

The tool can integrate with steady statemodelling tools, which can work out howdifferent product streams interact, some-thing particularly important for sub-seatiebacks when production from differentfields can mix together.

The software provides data goodenough to be used in Sarbanes-Oxley com-pliance and other regulatory procedures.

The company observes that its cus-tomers have seen a reduction in 'priod peri-od adjustments' because they got the dataright first time; they also used the data toincrease operational efficiency.www.p2es.com



IQPC Exchange

The problem, says Lars Olav Grovik,petroleum technical data depart-ment head with Norsk Hydro,nearly always comes down to

availability of resources (ie means manhours) and management focus. There arealways other priorities.

And just like the contents of your house,data does not organise itself.

Getting data organised properly needsthe combination of carrot and the stick.

The stick is the board of the companywho can see how much money the compa-ny can save, opportunities it can create, andaccidents it can potentially prevent by hav-ing better data management, and canmake sure it provides the resources andenforces the discipline to get it done.

The carrot is having good data manage-ment personnel, who will explain to peoplethe benefits of data management so theydon't feel they are asked to endlessly fillout pointless forms (as many people use).These people can put together systemswhich work well and everybody under-stands the purpose of. They can get every-body involved.

The biggest obstacle is often not thesenior management (who are being gradu-ally convinced of the importance of gooddata management), but the next layer ofmanagers, who are in charge of runningprojects, who have to fit data managementin with many other priorities.

And data management does not screamat anybody as a project which needs doing,because after all people are generally man-aging with the systems they have.

Using data in a disciplined way is not avery creative process, in fact very much theopposite, its about following rules.

However creating data systems can becreative, and involves an enormous array ofdifferent skills.

And when everything works well, peoplecan immediately access the data they want,correct, complete and formatted properly,in the words of Pearson Harper's directorSteve Pearson, "people's lives become sosimple."

When trying to get projects implement-ed, there are always many arguments youcan make for good information manage-ment, but perhaps you have to wait untilthe senior managers reach the decision bythemselves that data management should

become a high company priority.One tip, also from Steve Pearson of

Pearson Harper, is that when making thecase for a data management project, itsbest to focus on trying to cover the invest-ment costs, rather than focussing on thevery large amount that can be saved overthe life of the project by shaving a smallper cent off the total cost.

Doing a project to tidy up, organise andstreamline a company's data can be arewarding and positive experience (just liketidying up your house).

But its just hard work at the end of theday - Ian Hendry, maintenance perform-ance analyst with BP, said that keeping dataat a sustained high quality after you havesorted it out, can be much harder thancleaning it up.

Paul Cleverley

Paul Cleverley, information managementconsultant, Flare, talked about the systemhis company has developed for a major oilcompany, to help it to index its informationglobally.

Further information about the EPCatalog is in the Feb / March edition ofDigital Energy Journal.

The system allows users to see at aglance all the company data and docu-ments which might help them, rather thanhave to look in several different data storesand databases as they have done in thepast.

The idea is that E&P professionals do nothave to concern themselves with the struc-ture of the system, just use it to access the

company data and manage their teaminformation.

Uniquely, the system allows users to saywhat level of 'seriousness' or 'officialness' adocument is at - for example, if it is the finalversion of a document to be used for deci-sion making and archives, or a workingdocument.

When users feel that a document isready to share with the rest of the compa-ny, they can 'publish' it by putting an indexto the document in the catalogue.

Flare found that, once users came totrust the system, they enjoyed this processof publishing documents and making themavailable to the company.

Risks companies face from not manag-ing their information properly include notusing information which you had availableand might have helped; wasting time look-ing for information; and poor handover ofinformation, he said.

By having good information indexing, acompany can for example discover that ithas useful information in its archives fromwhen it was drilling in the same region 50years ago.

Different search systemsFlare is trying to develop a system whichwill tackle all of the different types of infor-mation an oil company needs to manage,ranging from intranets / discussions / wikis,to static documents and models, to rawdata.

For intranets, discussions and wikis, aGoogle-style text based searching mecha-nism may be most appropriate for helpingpeople find what they want.

For static documents and models, a textbased search is useful, but the documentscan also be indexed: for example, so youcan find a specific document about a spe-cific well which was used by a geologist tomake a certain decision.

Mr Cleverley said it was scary how muchmany oil and gas people have got used tousing Google to find out if there is anyinformation available about a particularfield, rather than searching for the informa-tion in a structured fashion.

The difference between finding docu-ments through indexing and throughsearch is perhaps best understood by thosewho remember Yahoo in the early internetdays. It tried to structure the internet soyou could find the documents by drillingdown through categories, rather thansearching for words.

"Full text searches like FAST, Yahoo,Autonomy, Verity and Google are fantasticfor mining all words in documents,

Evolutions in data management - IQPC reportDigital Energy Journal went to IQPC's oil and gas knowledge management conference in London, Feb27-28, to find out the latest industry developments and thinking in the best way to do it

Data management, data management. There are many people in oil companiesaround the world constantly screaming at their screens because they cannot get thedata they want, or worse, spending a high proportion of their time looking for data ormoving it from one application to another, and not knowing that it could be all doneautomatically.

Paul Cleverley, information managementconsultant, Flare

cont. page 25


Create a seamlessintegration betweenpeople, processes andtechnology

Drive change from top downand bottom up with freshinsights intoimplementing changemanagement

Implement advancedstrategies to digitaltechnology and realise itsimpact on your bottom line

Guarantee ROI on yourtechnical investment andensure your digital oilfieldcontinues to deliver on itstechnical promise

A well-balanced programmelinking all the phases of yourI-field project, and deliveringa holistic approach tomanaging yourautomated fields

www.futurefields.com/uk/futurefields/DEJPresented by:

9th – 10th May 2007One Whitehall Place, London, UK

Delivering an outstanding speakerpanel of over 30 field experts…

FUTUREFIELDSSUMMIT 2007Transforming E&P through integration:People, Processes & Technology

Plus! Don’t miss out on our exclusiveData Management Focus Day (8th May)

BP NederlandRepsol YPFShell UKENIRashid PetroleumCompanyChevronBG GroupOMVExxonMobilAddax Nigeria

University of HoustonPPDMAspen TechnologySAICScandpowerInvensysSASPetrisHuman FactorsSolutionsUpstream Technology

ShellDepartment of Trade &IndustryNorwegian Oil IndustryAssociation (OLF )Center for Maintenanceand Asset Management(SDV)EnergisticsISATNOUniversity of Stavanger

Featuring latest insights and solutions fromleading experts:

Hear compelling insights from:RussellBorgmanIntegrated OperationsCoordinatorCONOCOPHILLIPS

RonaldCramerSenior AdvisorSHELL

Steve ZelikovitzData ManagerEXXONMOBIL


P e t r o l e u m N e t w o r k E d u c a t i o n C o n f e r e n c e sA Divis ion of Phi l ip C. Crouse and Associates Inc .

1 1 T H I N T E R N A T I O N A L C O N F E R E N C E O N

PETROLEUM DATA INTEGRATION INFORMATION AND

DATA MANAGEMENT

A M S T E R DA MApril 19-20, 2007

Amsterdam Marriott HotelAmsterdam, The Netherlands

H O U S T O NJune 27-29, 2007

JW Marriott Hotel - GalleriaHouston, Texas USA

Join your associates for the best value, international, power-packed conference. You will profit from the mix of technology, future potential and current application realities presented.

Visit us online at www.pnecconferences.com

T H E DATA E X P L O S I O N C O N T I N U E S

Key technologies and drivers are requiring new practical solutions and innovative thinking.

Hear critical papers presented from the leaders of data, information and

knowledge management, sharing with you their insights of the current

challenges and real world data management solutions. This is the most power-

packed, professional conference in the industry, providing you immediate return

and networking opportunities with managers leading the data explosion.

Presentation authors are global. This event has been designed for data and

information management practitioners and users.

C H A L L E N G E S FO R T H E O I L A N D G A S I N D U S T RY

:: Integration & Processes :: Quality of Data

:: Cost Effective Solutions :: Interoperability

:: IM and Knowledge Management :: Quantity Management

CONFERENCES & EXHIBITS



IQPC Exchange

however you just need to ask technical pro-fessionals in oil companies that havedeployed full text search engines acrosstheir enterprise, "can users find the docu-ments they want? The answer is no," hesaid.

"You need capability for high precisionsearches, using E&P keywords and relation-ships to see the wood for the trees," hesays.

But its not a question of one or theother, you need both. "People get involvedin pointless debates, is it A (Full Text) versusB (Structured High Precision), and of coursethe answer is A and B," he says.

You need both approaches to answer allthe business questions people want to ask.

Even today, sometimes drilling cate-gories is a better way to find what youwant than using search words, particularlywhen you are looking for something whichis not particularly distinctive words.

It can be useful to be able to searchstatic documents geographically, for exam-ple, if a user wanted to find well logs for allwells in a certain region. One study foundthat 82 per cent of documents have a geo-graphical component to them (eg mention-ing a certain region).

Flare is experimenting with other waysto 'map' documents. For example, youcould draw a map showing the documentswhich relate to specific geological timeperiods, or, on much shorter time scales,which relate to specific periods in a well'sdevelopment history.

The index can be configured so that dif-ferent people can access the same docu-ments in a different way. For example, peo-ple working on a project can make all theirworking documents look as though theyare sitting in the same folder, whilst otherpeople in the company can see the samedocuments organised in a completely dif-ferent way, for example if they want to seeall the well logs for a specific rock typeglobally.

Another development is making patternrecognition, for users who regularly searchfor specific documents for particular wells(eg a well log and a seismic model). The sys-tem can remember the patterns andprompt the user so next time it can bringup all the right documents in a few clicks.

The software can be designed to auto-matically launch documents (so for exam-ple if you click on a reservoir model youcan launch the software which can viewthe model); it can also automatically launcha satellite photo showing the region inquestion.

The index is being extended to includeexternal documents, which the companymay not even own. It can show that if theusers want to retrieve that specific docu-ment, they have to pay a fee to the outsidecompany for it.

This system can be helpful though inmaking sure the company gets most valuefrom information it has bought from exter-nal providers with a license to share com-pany-wide, because other people can seewhat the company has bought.

For raw data, a different approach is nec-

essary. Users want to be able to access thedata in streams as 'web services', and layerdifferent data streams on top of each otherin complex ways.

To do this needs above all very strictcompany data standards, so everythingworks together.

Steve Pearson, Pearson-HarperSteve Pearson, managing director ofPearson-Harper, said his company was inthe business of 'content engineering', or inother words, structuring, validating and

maintaining engineering information.The company has been involved in data

management for many multibillion dollarprojects, including a £13bn project inAzerbaijan and a £4bn project in the NorthSea. "These are big projects. You have to getthe content right," he said.

Mr Pearson was previously a senior engi-neer at BP, specialising in instrumentation /control and IT issues.

He promised a 'practical and pragmatic'approach to information management,focusing firmly on the data itself, not thesystems.

There is no point in having sophisticat-ed approaches to managing information, ifthe information itself is not accurate, hepointed out - it's just a "more elegant wayof getting to our garbage."

Mr Pearson said he thought much ofthe common cost and time overruns ofmajor projects (with 40 per cent of over$1bn projects having cost and cycle over-runs of above 10 per cent) could be attrib-uted to poor information management.

The better the information managementis, the easier it is for people to access theright data. "And as soon as informationstarts to appear, people's jobs become easi-er. I'm sure we all know this," he said.

According to research by the Institute ofConfiguration Management, if the data isonly 95 per cent complete, people work atjust 60 per cent efficiency, he said.

It is common for people to spend 40 percent of their time trying to overcome defi-ciencies of information, he said. "We don'tknow any different.

We allow it in our time and budget."A company can only get away with this

level of wastage if its competitors are justas bad, he said.

There are strong safety implications to

good information management; goodinformation management can help a greatdeal to manage risks, because peopleknow much more about what they aredoing; conversely there is a lot of physicaldata associated with poor informationmanagement.

Mr Pearson said it used to be engineersthat were driving data management proj-ects, but now the company is being invitedto address board directors, who want tounderstand why they have had accidents,due to poor data management.

As an example of poor informationmanagement, Mr Pearson said he hadheard of one company offering services tooil companies doing hazardous equipmentinspections.

To do the inspection, the companywould draw a map of a plant and divide itup into grid squares, and log all the equip-ment in each square. They could onlycount up to 30 pieces of equipment ineach square, because that was the maxi-mum amount of information their hand-held data recorders could take.

Meanwhile, they missed a lot of oppor-tunities for streamlining the data, becausethe company often had the same piece ofequipment several times on the plant. Bylooking at the plant as a system instead ofsmall squares, they could have loggedwhere the same equipment was installedmore than once, making the data manage-ment much simpler.

In one project, there were 3,000 haz-ardous certificates in the system, but thecompany only needed 300 because therewere only 300 different pieces of equip-ment.

Similarly, by cleaning up componenttag numbers, oil companies can find theyhave a much lower number of differentspare parts to manage, which can lead to alot of savings in spare parts organisation.

One common problem is that peopleget so absorbed in their diagrams they for-get what they are for.

For example, the objective of a pipingand instrumentation diagram is to helpstop a pressure system from blowing up.

If you take this objective further logical-ly, you might design a system which wouldautomatically e-mail the person in chargeof the pressure system, if someone elsemakes an adjustment to a valve whichcould lead to the system not being safe.But because of poor data systems (eg -who is responsible for the pressure systemand how do you reach him?) nobody doesthings like this.

Another benefit of good informationmanagement is that a company knowsexactly how many of each part it hasbought, and which suppliers it can poten-tially get a better deal out of.

As an example, one client thought theyhad bought 4,000 actuators from a certainsupplier, and the supplier thought theyhad sold the company 400.

Pearson Harper found out that theclient had actually bought 8,000 actuators,but did not know, because they had allbeen purchased by intermediary contrac-

Steve Pearson, managing director ofPearson-Harper



IQPC Exchange

tors.Now the supplier knows that one client

bought 8,000 of their actuators, it is awareof how important that client is.

Mr Pearson talked about how the CEOof a major oil company once said that thecompany should design one, build many,for major projects (such as an FPSO).

An alternative route would be to justdesign one information set, which youcould then use over and over again, he said,even if the projects were all different.

Putting good data managementprocesses in place means that it is mucheasier to get the data you need, he said.

For example, one oil company was find-ing it had only half of the information itneeded about its topside rig equipment 18months after the first oil flow. By changingits processes, it had 98.9 per cent of thedata it needed,

12 months before the first oil.The cost savings are enormous. One

client estimated that it had saved £180m inoperating expenditure and £60m in capitalexpenditure over the life of a field on a£7bn project, through having better datamanagement procedures, he said.

However Mr Pearson cautioned thatmaking arguments like this is often not thebest way to get data management projectsapproved.

You are better off trying to demonstratehow the money expended on the datamanagement project can be recouped, hesaid.

Companies often say they don't havetime and money to do a data managementproject, but they always find the time andmoney they need to put things right laterwhen everything goes wrong.

On one project, Pearson Harper was try-ing to persuade a client for four years to letthem sort out the data management. Theclient refused, but eventually asked PearsonHarper to come in and fix the problemswhich had arisen from its poor data man-agement practises.

Many companies have a standard mind-set of trying to firefight, because this iswhat they spend so much time doing, sothey do not have a process of working outways they could potentially save havingproblems in the future.

One way companies can get their ven-dors to improve data management is byputting it in the contract. If you state thatthey should use templates and data man-agement tools, it forces them to make theirwhole operation properly data enabled."Get it in the beginning," he said.

Pearson Harper has set up an onlinedatabase of equipment related informationand spare parts, called PHusion. Companiescan subscribe to this vast library which hasbeen collected and maintained overPearson-Harper's 15 year history.

Ian Hendry, BPIan Hendry, maintenance performance ana-lyst with BP Exploration, talked about theimportance of having good data to be ableto optimise maintenance, and the chal-

lenges of getting good data.Mr Hendry's role at BP is to work out if

its equipment maintenance processes areoptimised, looking at its facilities in the UK

and the North Sea.Optimising maintenance involves opti-

mising maintenance task planning andscheduling, analysing the reliability of dif-ferent pieces of equipment, managing anymaintenance task backlogs, benchmarkingprocesses, and optimising the utilisation ofmanpower.

"My job as a maintenance performanceanalyst is entirely dependent on good datain the system," he said. "I'm very reliant ondata."

BP's asset care (maintenance) system isenormous. It has around 1 million main-tainable items in its database, about 4,500users, and 1.8 million man hours of activityare recorded in the system annually (equiv-alent to 1,000 full time employees).

"The asset care system is the engine thatdrives our business and the fuel is thedata," he said.

3 years ago, the company embarked ona project to move all its maintenance sys-tems into one asset care system. It usesIBM's Maximo software.

Now the company wants to move itsfocus now on the underlying data, ratherthan the software tools.

"We've got a lot of education to do," hesaid.

The UK asset team is trying to work clos-er with other areas of BP, to discuss andshare best practises. "As well as identifywhat is needed, we have to identify whatisn't needed," he said.

In the project phase, when a facility isbeing built, it is important to specify thatthe data must be to a certain standard; andno matter what you do, there is always acertain loss in data quality moving to theoperations phase, he said. For example,sometimes equipment is modified, but theassociated maintenance requirements arenot.

Sustaining high data standards canprove more difficult than getting data to ahigh standard, he said. "Data quality doesnot happen by itself - that to me is what weneed to focus on."

One challenge is determining who isresponsible for the quality of different bits

of data. Another one is convincing peoplehow important it is to maintain the data.

Many people are used to spending timefilling in forms, and imagine that the data isnever used. He suggests more effort isneeded to educate people on why data isimportant and how it will be utilised tocontinually improve performance movingforward.

Data does not necessarily have to beperfect, he said. "I used to think, there's nopoint in using poor data. But if you wait fordata to be correct you will never start."

Thore Langeland, OLFThore Langeland, manager of integratedoperations with The Norwegian Oil IndustryAssociation (OLF), talked about some of theprojects going on in Norway. TheAssociation has 28 oil company membersand 53 service company members, and theNorwegian government is also involved.

The advantage of integrated operationsis "safer, faster and better decisions," hesaid, ultimately helping you reduce costs /increase profit, increase safety and increaserecovery.

"We get real time data onshore and inte-grate this data, and it leads to technical and

organisational consequences," he said.Mr Langeland personally spearheaded

many of the integrated operations effortsin Norway. He initiated the building ofLicenseWeb in 1999, an online tool to man-age information about oil and gas licenses,and organised the first seminar inStavanger in April 2000 about e-operations.

The Association calculated that thevalue of integrated operations in Norway,using methods it knew would work, wasNOK 250 bn ($40.6bn).

You could say that the first generation ofintegrated operations is setting up onshoresupport centres, he said, where one compa-ny monitors its own operations.

The second generation is where severalcompanies get involved. By 2015, vendorswill remotely supporting their own equip-ment, he believes.

Mr Langeland was sceptical about theidea that people's conservatism would be abarrier to integrated operations. "There isno creature more flexible than the humanbeing," he said.

Thore Langeland, manager of integrat-ed operations with The Norwegian OilIndustry Association (OLF)

Ian Hendry, maintenance performanceanalyst with BP Exploration



IQPC Exchange

The Association held a workshop in2006 about the relationship between inte-grated operations and safety, with 7unions, oil companies and service compa-nies participating.

"They recommenced health, safety andenvironment (HSE) has to be a driver forintegrating operations," he said. "Youshould have to set goals for HSE whenimplementing integrated operations."

However Mr Langeland said there wasnot necessarily any benefit to trying tostandardise how different companiesapproach integrated operations in theNorth Sea. "We need common data stan-dards, not a common approach," he said.

Mr Langeland described how he sawdifferent oil companies' approach to infor-mation management.

"BP - I see - is really a top down process.They have a very wide view all the waydown," he said.

"Conoco Philips is more bottom up -they look at the technology and what isavailable and move up."

"Hydro - they run a very formal process -test out a pilot - see if it functions in onefield, then move on."

"Statoil - they are looking into areaswhich are technically mature. For example,they defined condition monitoring onrotating equipment as mature. Theydescribed condition monitoring on staticequipment as not mature."

"Four companies, four differentapproaches, and I think they are all doingwell."

The Association is trying to promote theidea of all companies using an ontology(which maps the relationships between dif-ferent data) based on the ISO 15926 stan-dard. It is building up a database of howdifferent data types relate to each other.

Oil industry standards body Energisticsis also working on the project.

It will develop different data schemesfor health and safety, seismic, drilling andwell, development projects, reservoir, pro-duction, transport, operation / mainte-nance, and logistics.

Meanwhile the Association has tried toencourage the operators of fibre opticcables to consolidate, or at least talk toeach other, so the whole network wouldwork in a co-ordinated way. Now the threefibre operators meet each other a fewtimes a year.

The Association has set up an informa-tion security group.

It is running WiMax trials, with one start-ing on the Valhall rig from February 2007to December 2007. "We will work how toshare Wimax on the Norwegian continentalshelf if it is successful," he said.

It has a project working out how today'srigs could be adapted to better supportintegrated operations, what communica-tions facilities, equipment and workingareas are required. "We have a workgrouplooking at fundamental requirements," hesaid.

Norway was recognised by US consul-tancy Cambridge Energy Research

Associates as a "leader in harnessing IT toenhance production practises," he said.

James Kochan, Vitesse SolutionsJames Kochan, managing director of US oiland gas knowledge management consul-tancy Vitesse Solutions, talked about hisefforts to help companies exchange moreknowledge.

You need to look at knowledge manage-ment projects as a flow of knowledgegoing in many directions, called a many-to-many collaboration, instead existing one-to-one flows where the knowledge is only

shared between those two, he said.Another typical problem is that while

departments or local operations are oftengood at sharing knowledge within them,there is often little sharing with otherdepartments or geographic locations with-in the company; people do not see theneed to share information with otherdepartments or locations and maybe evenfeel in competition with them, heexplained.

The solution is to develop and nurturecommunities that share globally from dif-ferent locations and departments.

While networking is by its nature infor-mal, it is important that people feel that itis something they should do as part oftheir day job. "If collaborating in a networkdoesn't help people in their day jobs, it's anevening club, and has to compete withother things people do in the evening," hesaid.

Many companies have tried knowledgemanagement but threw away their workafterwords because they were unhappywith the small amount of progress.

Mr Kochan advocated using even thefailed projects as a basis for the next one."Success happens incrementally," he said.

Companies and employees will oftencome up with excuses not to get involvedin knowledge management activities,'we're different, we can't do that here'. MrKochan stressed it is important not toaccept that excuse, since most cultures in afree society are the same in many basicways. Unless they are in North Korea orCuba, some type of sharing can always beaccomplished.

One problem is that consultants arebrought in, and think they are expected to

come up with grand solutions in a shortperiod of time, which end up being tooambitious.

"People say, we had so much energy, weworked so hard, why did it go wrong?"

"When you push a working culture toohard, like pushing your 13 year old child, atsome point the people turn off to you, youlose credibility," he said. "Take only whatthe culture will give you."

Most importantly people need to beconvinced. "When people say they don'thave time to collaborate, they really mean,they don't see the value in it," he said.

You can't simply order your staff to col-laborate, it is too vague. "Saying we wantyou to collaborate is like saying we wantworld peace," he said. "People need aprocess".

Some companies try to enduce staff towork together more, by promising smallgifts, like T-shirts and caps, but they missthe point of what staff are really motivatedby.

"I'm half and half on T-Shirts and caps,"he said. "Those things are nice. But peoplemore like recognition and accomplishment,the feeling of going home and havingdone something. People operate forrewards and recognition from their workand home."

"People feel really good if someonecomes to them with a serious issue andthey help them out."

Vitesse sees information technology asonly one of about ten critical factors youhave to get right for knowledge manage-ment to work, not something the wholeproject is about.

IT can even be a barrier, if people cannotdownload the information they want, orhave to keep signing in to get to the infor-mation. "IT is a garnishment on the plate - itis a very important one - but the processhere is king," he said.

Liv Maeland, StatoilLiv Maeland, senior advisor for explorationand production data management withStatoil, said that she thought good datamanagement should be strict. "You have toget people to handle data in a homoge-nous manner," she said. "There is no roomfor individual creativity"

"Some geophysical / geological usersfind it hard to switch between the creativegeophysical and geological environmentand our straitjacketed data managementenvironment. Most geoscientists find datamanagement tedious."

Ms Maeland is responsible for Statoil'ssubsurface data management network.

"I believe I have Statoil's top manage-ment support," she said. "Statoil views datamanagement as an enabler to increasedefficiency in the decision process and anenabler for improved quality in the deci-sion basis."

"The challenge is the next layer of man-agement. They have many important activi-ties and data management is often thelowest priority," she said.

"We believe establishing a data manage-

James Kochan, managing director of Vitesse Solutions



IQPC Exchange

ment organisation - stating who is respon-sible for what is extremely important," shesaid.

"Another important thing is to establisha corporate data store strategy. Where arewe going to store, what and when."

The company has set up one specificdata store for every data type used in thecompany and it has 50 data standards indaily use.

Vendors can take a share of the blame forpoor data management she said."Historically, our vendors have been verypoor at delivering data managementtools."

Statoil states in its company technicalrules that each asset is responsible formaking sure that its data is secure, com-plete, valid, and unique.

The company has a collaboration sys-tem and knowledge portal calledEarthWeb. "All our best practises are on it,"she said. "We monitor the time peoplespend on data finding, accessing, manipu-lating, interpreting, documenting andarchiving their information."

Ideally new geological and geophysicalemployees should not be allowed to usethe IT system unless they have beentrained in data management, she said.

"Training is a never ending project.Offering training is one thing, getting it isanother thing."

It is also important to have competent,motivated and available support staff. "Youneed to ensure your data managementstaff have status in the company - title andsalary," she said. "Rotate data managementstaff from assets into IT. Have a trainingprogram for support staff."

Jerry Hubbard, EnergisticsJerry Hubbard, executive vice president ofEnergistics (formerly POSC) talked aboutEnergistics' renewed efforts to make sure itis creating standards which people can use,and are using.

"Standards on the shelf have no busi-ness value," he said. "Standards which aredeployed have business value."

"Not a lot of time is spent on deploy-ment of standards. We need to start talkingabout that. We need to build a businesscase for the standards," he said.

It wants to spend more time communicat-ing to the industry about the standards."We need to get our communication syn-chronised, get our members to take themessage out," he said. Energistics aims tofoster a neutral and collaborative approachto developing standards, where the partici-pating companies share the developmentrisk. Energistics currently has 5 staff mem-bers, and 68 companies as members. Themembership fee each company paysvaries, depending on the size of the com-pany.

WITSMLThe WITSML standard, developed byEnergistics (under its previous name POSC)for managing drilling information, is now 6years old, and is used by 40 companies.

Energistics is now trying to keep thestandard static, to avoid the problem ofmore than one different versions('dialects') in circulation in the industry.

Now Energistics is gathering feedbackon how well it is working.

Statoil has said that the lack of automa-tion systems was a barrier to a 'full' imple-mentation of WITSML.

Statoil found that it still had many man-ual operations to maintain the stream ofreal time data from the well, it was notpossible to just leave it running. There wasalso manual work needed to handle thedifferent dialects of WITSML in use, he said.

It also found that WITSML was not prop-erly supporting automation, and the soft-ware applications were not properly sup-porting real time data.

There were some software products notable to support multiple data streams, hesaid.

On the positive said, Statoil found thatWITSML did efficiently transport data tothe Statoil operations centres, and hasbeen central to getting value from inte-grated operations.

Meanwhile Hydro, which has usedWITSML since October 2005, said that themany different dialects of WITSML was anegative.

A negative was that some of the soft-ware being used (such as OpenSpirit,GeoFrame, Bore, Predict and RMS) was notoriginally designed for real time data.

On the positive side, Hydro liked havingone central WITSML server in the company,

which could handle the interface to all thedifferent service companies.

In its internal software, Hydro has restrict-ed itself to one WITSML dialect.

PRODMLEnergistics' next big project is PRODML,developing a communications standard forproduction data.

The standard was developed over thecourse of one year.

The PRODML team tried hard to limit thescope of the standard (what it was going todo), so that it was achievable and expecta-tions were managed.

The working group held 2-3 hour confer-ence calls every two weeks; there was asteering committee, an operational team, acontent team, and a technical team.

It did not aim for closed loop control(where instructions are sent from theremote operations centre back to the well).

3 pilot projects were conducted, lookingat a gas lift well with changing inlet gas;monitoring free flowing wells; and fieldwidesurveillance.

Mr Hubbard demonstrated how bettercontrol of a well can lead to improved pro-duction (see graph below).

The graph shows how production ratechanges with time, when you do nothing(bottom curve), when you fiddle with it periodically (jagged line), or if you can con-tinually adjust things (top curve). The areashaded blue represents the benefit of con-tinual adjustment of the system over peri-odic adjustment of the system.

"If the optimisation is automatic you canget closer to your production potential," he said.

Lars Olav Grovik, HydroLars Olav Grovik, petroleum technical datadepartment head with Hydro, talked abouthis project to try to revamp the company'sinternal data management systems.

The company began by making a deci-sion to completely change its software, andsubsequently managed to change 90 percent of it.

Then it moved the focus onto the data,work processes, and people.

It began by trying to find out how goodits data management was. It surveyed twodifferent business areas, with 320 users intotal surveyed and 231 of them completingthe survey.

When asked how easy it is to get infor-mation about the quality of data they areusing, 11.7 per cent said difficult; 40.7 percent said difficult; 29.9 per cent said neither

Liv Maeland, senior advisor for explorationand production data management withStatoil

Jerry Hubbard, Energistics,executive vice president



IQPC Exchange

easy nor difficult, 10.8 per cent said easy; 3per cent said very easy; 3.9 per cent don'tknow, he said.

When asked if they can read data fromother disciplines in their main softwaretool, 10 per cent said no; 35.5 per cent saidpartly - some deficiencies; 45.9 per centsaid yes - the most important data; 8.7 percent said yes.

The worst performing software for read-ing data from other disciplines was Recalland GeoTrace, he said.

When asked how much time they spendmaintaining data sets on their main soft-ware tool from other disciplines, 78.3 percent said up to 20 per cent of time and 21.7per cent said between 20 and 40 per centof time.

Mr Olav Grovik said he thought theyspent a lot more time than this. "Werealised - people are so used to spendingtime moving data that time doesn't count.It only counts when they have seriousproblems," he said.

When asked how easy / difficult is it tolocate petrotechnical data, 29 per cent saiddifficult.

When asked "Is your petrotechnical datastored according to Hydro's routines," 27per cent didn't know, he said, a result MrOlav Grovik found particularly unsettling.

One unexpected problem was in mov-ing data between Microsoft Excel andPowerPoint, which is not as good as youmight expect.

"PowerPoint is the most important inter-pretation tool," he said. "No important deci-sion is made without PowerPoint. If youcan't get data into PowerPoint you have aproblem."

A typical problem was that PowerPointcould change the shading on a seismicmodel, for example changing a transparentshading to a solid one, so that a carefullydrawn image would look completelywrong.

One interesting discovery was that manypeople sometimes preferred Google Earthto the company's more expensive in-housegeographical information system (GIS). "Wewill probably implement Google Earth," hesaid.

The biggest data management problemwas "nearly always resources (manhours)and management focus," he said.

Other typical problems are a lack of fastdata retrieval systems, and a lack of uniformdata structures.

Improvement projectMr Olav Grovik than started a project atHydro to improve its data management.

It began by asking ExxonMobil, BP Shelland Statoil about their data managementorganisation.

"We realised they had very differentinformation management strategies," hesaid. "We realised it doesn't matter whichapproach we take as long as we do it."

First of all, the company decided to linktogether the separate data stores whicheach project team had.

It appointed asset data managers, with

an important and central position in thecompany.

"They have to be a person who is wan-dering around," he said. "We had to have away people could get total overview of thedata flow."

A pilot project for the new system washeld in the Barents Sea.

Setting up a new data management sys-tem while people are using the data is like"changing the wheels on the car when thevehicle is running," he said. "There havebeen nights when I have not been sleepingvery well."

Mr Olav Grovik said that he recentlyspoke to a company which had a systemfor tracking equipment by RFID tags, buthe could not understand their data filingsystem.

Then someone who had worked withthe company's employees several yearsbefore on a different project said that theyhad designed their data filing systemaround the 31 tags that they used onpaper dividers. "They were following theirold mindset," he said.

Rompetrol

Felix Enescu, chief information officer ofRomanian oil and gas company Rompetrol,says he often falls that everything is chang-ing around him all the time. "

"I personally feel like this," he said. "Wehave to build IT which can adapt to thispressure."

Rompetrol has recently expanded inter-nationally a great deal, from a 'smallRomanian company to a small multination-al," he said, which created many challengeswith its IT.

The company analysed its attitude to ITand decided that it was a 'late adopter' oftechnology, something it is keen tochange.

Most of the company's business opera-tions are in refining, it does not have agreat deal of exploration and productionwork, which means it does not necessarilyneed the latest technology.

Flemming RolleFlemming Rolle, manager of informationand application systems with Dong, chair-

ing the conference, said his company hasIT designed more for transaction systems,which needs to be very reliable; this is whythe company could consider itself a latefollower with IT.

However the company needs to adopta different attitude in its exploration andproduction, where it is important to havethe latest technology.

"In exploration, the practitioners seethemselves as artists making risky deci-sions. In production, it's essential all theinformation is properly tagged etc," he said.

Stefano Ventura, ENI

Stephano Ventura, Data & CorporateDatabase Project with manager, ENI E&PDivision, said that the company has a proj-ect to try to rationalise its data captureprocesses, so it could get the data in theright format for regulators. It is also tryingto manage the data flows, so data is onlyentered once.

"Getting the data in the right format isa big challenge," he said. "A project likethis is long and painful. You have to man-age inter-department conflicts. People arethe criticalities."

The company started the project in2000, with a team of 6 people, who weren'tdedicated full time to the project.

ENI staff have been brought to its officein Milan for training.

Mr Ventura said he comes from the'technical' side of the company.

When asked how he calculates howmuch value the project is adding, MrVentura said he checks how the system isbeing used.

Felix Enescu, chief information officer ofRompetrol

Stephano Ventura, Data & CorporateDatabase Project with manager, ENI E&PDivision

IQPC are also running Future Fields (London) and The Oil and Gas Exchange(Houston) this year - for further information seewww.iqpc.com or e-mailElizabeth McAleer [email protected]


We maintain your energy!Software solutions for efficient, productive and profitable Asset Management.

www.spectec.net/oilandgas [email protected]

Asset Management

Logistic Management

Maintenance Management

Procurement Management

Project Management

Remote Management

Quality & Safety Management


FOCUS ON DATAMANAGEMENT - Digital Energy Journal · ATCE, Petex, Digital Energy ... treat it like...

Documents

Transcript of FOCUS ON DATAMANAGEMENT - Digital Energy Journal · ATCE, Petex, Digital Energy ... treat it like...