Leveraging Information Technology – Petrotech 2014

Petrotech is India’s premier oil & gas convention. This note is built around the deliberations at the event on 10^th Jan. 

I resist using the word IT, which had become a commodity skill and is often most misused and abused term in science or technology. IT has become such a wide and overarching term that ceases to have any specific meaning or context. 

Information Technology is aptly covered by various speakers narrating in  broad terms how the entire gamut of E&P is affected by and touched by this.  Global E&P enterprise with capital outlay running about $100B/y, is natural to be touched by computer based methods of working. Often seen as a “rich” industry, deploying Petaflops or Petabytes is akin to billionaire buying Ferrari!

IT companies like system manufacturers (IBM), service providers (Wipro), E&P IS players (Schlumberger, Konsberg), E&P companies (Cairn, ONGC, RIL) and Refineries (IOCL, BP) and Consultants (E&Y, PWC etc.) contributed to the events of the day.

1. Clearly every facet of the business has opportunity to be optimized and made efficient using Information. However, with disparate technical systems and heterogeneous data – only incremental islands of improvements are being achieved.
2. The 1960-2010+ growth story of the E&P identifies the expanding size and use of seismic data from early CDP gathers to current 4D/4C surveys. Surely, before 2020 real-time cross-borehole seismic will be deployed in modern fields (nD, 4C – n Dimensional, 4C).
3. Data remains an evasive dimension. E&P holds Petabytes using Petaflops – yet, << 1% of its data volumes are in databases. About 100,000 world-wide workforce of E&P professionals mostly work disconnected and never collated into a single unified “innovation crowd”. Therefore, the available mind-flops (measure of human minds working together) are very small! There is considerable misplacement of the importance when “computer science” and “computing” are treated synonymous. This is already proving costly to innovation in E&P.

It came about – E&P is very Conservative!

      4.  Digital oil field is surmised into integrated operational framework driven by unified information interchange. Having implemented this at my current work place, I felt consoled that this achievement is prevalent and common metric for these i-fields! Questions remain:

1. Has this paved way for new insights in to high-frequency (DCS capture at milli-seconds), high-volume (>100,000 tags) phenomenon that drive the HC fields?

2. Are there new micro-reservoir modeling approaches in place?

3. Are there any measures to say what was possible and what is achieved?

     5.  Computer technology has gone around cycles from consolidation (main-frames) to distribution (cloud). Data-centric computing (driven by Hadoop) is the new development. Comments that “cloud” is not yet suitable to E&P HPC work is interesting considering JPL has used Amazon cloud for nearly same kind of work. The IBM Watson is important – not because it won Jeopardy, but because it used certain computer science methods that extract intelligence from different kinds of data structures (and unstructured data). There is pretty little in E&P space that deploys the core techniques of Watson. Prospector – was in 1980, the most successful rule-based “expert-system”. It never became a tool for E&P. Watson-Jeopardy is similarly a novel break-through – but trying to use it in E&P is amusing.

     Rich people buy new car models – whether they use, disuse or abuse. Rich E&P companies buy new HPC and data-technologies in the same parlance. Thanks to theory of “probability”, whether the god plays dice or not, Geoscientists are adept at doing it. Thanks to HPC, we now create 100s of millions of cells in 3D models of single well fields with 100 realizations – only to drill next appraisal well – DRY! There is little consciousness or measure of the Value of Information.  

I have to quote J.C.Davis (1982 book p10 – Statistics and Data Analysis in Geology, John Wiley). “The presentation of masses of numbers, all expressed to eight decimal places, overwhelms the minds of many people and numbs their natural skepticism. … output usually will bluff all but a few critiques, and those who understand and comment also do so in equally obtuse terms. … The greatest danger, is … led to the most ludicrous conclusions, totally blind to any reality beyond the computer ..”.  I never understood how doing 1000 realizations of a transformation based on a linear-relationship will reduce uncertainty. What was possible from a single carefully created “seismic inversion” study is now made into 100 realizations occupying a terabyte and giving the “same” GCOS (Geological Chance-of-Success) to the new well location!

     6. SMAC work was shown in integrated information system development at 2 of India’s largest refinery companies. The downstream has seen Specific, Measureable, Achieved, Challenging task of information integration with diverse systems and ERP. This is an important pointer to E&P companies. The clarity of top management driver in Downstream is a pointer to “engineering” –versus “geoscience” mindset that differentiates these two industries.

      7. An aspect that all E&P companies love to highlight is the “knowledge worker” and “ageing work-force”. The fact that in 2013, 100:1 ratio of applications were made to E&P professional positions, is a pointer of “plenty”. Quantity is never a substitute to Quality. If the systems that attract the students, the curriculum that moderates them and the evaluations that elevate them are weak – the 100:1 also cannot give you quality man-power. 

The moot question is what caliber can such weak systems produce in the industry?

That is what I dealt with at the workshop. (updated slide pack at http://www.slideshare.net/srikantg/the-reality-of-big-crew-change-in-ep). 

• E&P is progressing far-too-slowly as a Scientific methodology or a Technology practice. 
• There is an urgent need to reassess the approach with other high-performance sciences and industries AND take corrective action towards DISD.

E&P is changing slowly. Demand models of the Hydrocarbons and great prices are ensuring profitability. New fronts are opening in Deep-water and Shale-gas. None of these automatically imply that the data, method, analysis and inference are evolving at transformational rates. I firmly believe that this slow adaptation and change of E&P is moot cause for human resource crunch issue. The methodology developed 20-50 years ago remains "closed" with the "experienced" and remains "relevant"!

One may not agree with uncomfortable things.

• IT is largely doing a service or commodity to E&P – NOT driving innovation
• E&P is comfortable with the current efficiencies due to its special status
• World at large doesn’t know how to question E&P as only 100,000 people know details clearly about it, among the 7.2 billion!

Mflops in smartphones and Gigabytes disk space on Google-Drive are driving for more resources. CIO is concerned that in similarly Petabytes and Petaflops are deployed and expanded in E&P.

It is Win-Win-Win. Computer companies can sell their ware; Service companies can sell proprietary black-boxes; Oil companies can sell oil at their demanded price.