Oil & Gas Technical Information Systems

Petroleum Exploration & Production business deals with a variety of sciences, technologies and specializations. Along with all the information systems of standard business like ERP, EDMS, GIS etc., the Oil & Gas business handles typically 200-300 technical applications.

This note shall examine the experience with the technical applications over the last 3 decades. The SWOT of the application scenario is addressed. In the light of the current trends in application organization and delivery, the high-value opportunities are identified. CIO for Oil&Gas business has daunting task of specifying, developing and delivering these gold-mines for E&P.

Oil & Gas has embarked on large-scale use of computers in 1980s when Seismic data processing and Well-log analysis made great strides. By 1985, workstations (Micro-Vax) provided high-end graphic rendering and facilities for interpretation and visualization. 1990s, CRAY Super-computers were deployed to do first sets of 3D reservoir simulation. With growth in hardware capabilities, the processing power came to the desktop. This quantum leap in accessibility was restrained by the “closed” approach to highly lucrative “intellectual property” that got into various technical applications.

There are few (if any) “original” mathematical formulations or “algorithmic techniques” that oil & gas invented. The IP was around bringing mature mathematics, statistics or methods from signal processing, econometrics or other fields into use upon oil & gas data. Significant amount of unique graphic programs got developed. This was done as ever-increasing lists of technical applications drive the business.

As I am writing this, the entire technical application portfolio is proprietary, costing anywhere up to $500,000 per license. This cost-factor has substantially restricted access to them. Vast majority of E&P Professionals cannot decompose these vanilla applications’ workflow or process into its universal mathematical components, which can be configured on standard Matlab or R. This “black box” approach has substantially inhibited innovation in Oil & Gas. Adding to this, even standard graphical rendering has not been released as Plug-ins or libraries for free usage.

Oil & Gas data model has seen some collaborative development of standards through “POSC”. While definitions have evolved within Energistics and PPDM, the implementations are few, incomplete, sparsely understood and remain proprietary.

Innovation in Science has developed into 4^th Paradigm wherein the components – i) databases, ii) workflows, iii) Analytics and iv) communication are developed into  a colloborative framework. Oil & Gas will significantly enhance its deliverability and innovation through rapid change in their approach. They will miss the opportunity and resulting effectiveness with the current “closed” approach.

Oil & Gas professionals (Geologists, Geophysicists, Reservoir-Production-Drilling Engineers etc) have little formal introduction to computer databases, programming and architecture. They function with universally available general knowledge. No curriculum or organizational effort has been made similar to MyExperiment in this area. Ironically, even the relevance of such collaborative efforts is seldom identified.

The future of Oil & Gas technical applications will be determined by the controlled vendor group holding the technology. However, the future of Oil & Gas business will be driven by the new considerations evolving from complexities of tough-oil, economics and environment.

CIO needs to see this changing game and prepare the academia, industry, technology partners and government to this gold-mine.