With nearly 70% of current global oil production flowing from fields more than 30 years old – and peaking or in decline – oil companies are increasingly focused on information technology’s role in helping the upstream industry face the ‘challenges and opportunities’ of the coming decade.
[box]STREAMLINING OPERATIONAL PROCESSES THROUGH information management systems – now the ‘enabling’ realm of e-, i-, digital and smart fields – is a subject that has been pushed toward the spotlight in the last few years as the oil and gas industry continues its two-front campaign to lower exploration and development costs while increasing and extending production from workhorse developments the world over.[/box]
Though IM has long been a keen supporter of the technology-driven oil and gas business, E&P companies are becoming more aware of the prize to be derived from an IM philosophy that ‘connects the people, process, and technology of a function into an integrated, secure system so information can be captured, analysed, and utilised in a way that increases operational value’, as Schlumberger Information Solutions (SIS) president Kjell-Erik Ostdahl pointed out at last year’s Paris forum on IM organized by SIS.
IM, he said, was now hard-wired into every level of the industry, from the acquisition, processing and visualisation of 3D seismic and well data, through reservoir simulation to predict production performance, to back-office integration that curbs administrative expenses and ITleveraged lower personnel costs. ‘The basis of these accomplishments was, and remains, process-relevant information,’ Ostdahl stated, ‘available in the right place at the right time to achieve the right decisions.’
For Occidental Petroleum CIO Don Moore, IM – and its handmaiden, information technology – is viewed as a ‘key enabler’ in both the company’s ongoing pursuit of new reserves and its efforts to ‘moderate production decline rates’ from its legacy assets. Through the move toward IMempowered virtual E&P project teams, a ‘plugand- play workforce’, remote drilling and operations and the ‘perfect well index’, Moore said Oxy was showing it was possible to reduce operating expenditure by 10-25% while boosting overall production by as much as 7%.
‘Our assets typically have moderate production decline rates and the opportunity to raise our production by providing operational efficiencies and extending late field life, so we have been focused on developing enabling technologies, tools and processes with the help of IM and IT,’ he offered, noting that his company could now turnaround complex plan-of-depletion studies ‘in 2-3 weeks rather than 3-4 months’.
Steve Comstock, VP for upstream computing at ExxonMobil, stressed that while ‘technology – information or otherwise – is one of the keys to being in the oil and gas business’, it would not be used to greatest effect if applied indiscriminately. ‘Our distinct business principle is to put the money in to those areas of IT that, number one, will address our specific portfolio of assets, or, number two, those assets that we aim to get involved in.’ He added that ExxonMobil aimed to avoid reinventing the wheel in developing technologies that would benefit its asset base. ‘We feel we have to be quick to identify those technologies that are commodity technologies, not investing in those areas where someone else is simply better at it than we are.’
The balance to be struck between developing IM systems and investing in the people who use them, in the eyes of ChevronTexaco CIO Gary Masada, is one that is increasingly important. ‘When you change your information management and IT systems you have to make certain you change your business processes and [corporate] culture too,’ he noted.
‘Integration’ remains at the core of Total CIO Philippe Chalon’s thinking on IM. He underlined that notions of the omnipotent role to be played by IM in the future of the upstream industry should be set aside until the miscellany of ITdriven technologies are serviceably knitted together. ‘We must keep our eye on the prize to be had from the full integration of hardware, software, networks, data and our people.’
The changes likely to be wrought by IT and IM in the global oil and gas industry could hardly be more transformative, in former Shell CIO Grahaeme Henderson’s view, as they will ‘create new opportunities to improve performance at every stage of the hydrocarbon lifecycle by speeding-up operations, removing duplication, sharing learning and standardising processes’.
‘The key IT trends in E&P,’ he said, ‘will include the move from wired to wireless in the office and the field; from services taking time to be delivered to being available on demand from any location; from high cost one-off units to lowcost commodity items, and from limited intelligence, stand-alone devices to smart integrated systems.
Yet for any company to make this happen, said Henderson, IT and IM could not be developed in a vacuum. ‘Regardless of the technological breakthroughs in the oil and gas industry next ten years,’ he concluded, ‘we can only be successful if we are able to integrate technology with our single most important driver of performance which will always be our people’. OE
By Darius Snieckus
Source: Oil Online
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