Leveraging Big Data in Oil & Gas Sector
By Anil Bajpai
A vision towards an integrated exploration and production (E&P) data management platform still remains a challenge in the oil and gas sector. It is a daunting task to extract business-critical intelligence and insights from large volumes of data in a complex environment of legacy diverse systems and fragmented and decentralized solutions that are common in the O&G sector.
Most O&G companies are primarily concerned with challenges associated in managing vast complexity of E&P data such as seismic, drilling, well and production. Moreover upstream data is growing exponentially in the form of both structured as well as unstructured data.
An effective strategy to gain on-demand insights from such E&P data is critical for decision making. Analyzing this data will help O&G companies gain in-depth knowledge on drilling patterns; infer various types of soil contents based on parameter models and compare well curve information across various oil wells.
Some typical challenges for E&P data management in the O&G sector are:
· Upstream focused applications are at a functional level. So, substantial time is spent in data collection and running reports for a given asset level i.e. for a single well or aggregate wells in a given location.
· A majority of applications are still non-PPDM-based (Professional Petroleum Data Management Association), which makes the reports and KPIs non-accurate at most times.
· It is difficult to derive insights from unstructured data lying in multiple applications.
· It is difficult to run predictive analytics as data is spread out in multiple systems with lesser integrity and reference to master-level data.
Necessity for Digital Oil Field Enterprise Platform
It is in this challenging situation, that a Digital Oil Field Enterprise Platform comes in. It integrates E&P data from different project phases — Seismic, Drilling, Well and Production — into a single consolidated platform.
The solution should leverage big data enabled cloud infrastructure, an integrated workflow, an accelerated digitized solution framework, hybrid data models and a host of accelerators for data migration.
A digital E&P data management platform should be designed to fit within an O&G operator’s or an oil field service provider’s technology infrastructure and easily provide on-demand information. A ready-to-use accelerator as well as interface with third-party Geologist and Geophysicists (G&G) product suites is one of the critical success factors.
Benefits of Applying Big Data Enabled Solution
The crux of the big data enabled solution is to provide a holistic view of information by processing diverse data along with an understanding of its relationships and patterns and thereby enabling a quick decision-making process related to reservoir and optimization of data exploitation.
The E&P data management platform focused on oil and gas companies offers them the following:
· Scalable architecture to analyze terabytes to petabytes of multi-structured well log data;
· Massive parallel processing providing unified view of the data from multiple wells during its lifecycle — be it at the planning, operations or post-completion stage;
· Integrated KPI framework — for commercials, operations, health and safety execution, productions, etc.;
· An extendable PPDM compliant data-model and Energistics standards to manage the data with a partner ecosystem;
· Comparative analytics and correlations with wells in similar geologic conditions to help decision making for drilling oil wells;
· Oil and gas domain encyclopedia for easy interpretation of scientific terminology.
Anil Bajpai is Senior Vice President and Head- Research and Innovation, iGATE
