Improving use of collaborative technologies for oil and gas

Tuesday, February 16, 2010
London
The Geological Society, London

Our February 16th London forum - free to attend - looked at improving use of collaborative technologies in the oil and gas industry. This was our 8th Finding Petroleum event - we've had one Conference and 7 Forums - and we had many new faces in our audience this time. Of course, hosting a growing number of attendees from a widening "tribe" is good news for us although we did wonder whether this was a signal that the folk we have come to regard as our "regulars" from the oil & gas industry have not yet allowed these collaborative technologies into their consciousness!

If so, a pity because they they missed a great event!

We had speakers from BP (Julian Pickering, from the Field of the Future programme office); Capgemini (Patrick J Quinlan, Vice President, Global Leader Oil & Gas Services, Center of Excellence); Kadme (Vasily Borisov, Director; Kongsberg Intellifield Limited (Nicholas Gibson, General Manager) and Paradigm (Andy Sutherland, EVP for IMENA, CIS and Europe, Paradigm).

As usual, the event was chaired by David Bamford, a past head of exploration at BP and currently a non executive director of Tullow Oil.

Julian Pickering from BP's Field of the Future programme office talked about the progress it has made sharing drilling and completions data, using the Energistics WITSML standard. In all new contracts, it specifies that real time information should be provided in a WITSML compliant format, enabling the data to be delivered to its drilling collaboration centres. For example in its Gulf of Mexico office, it has display screens showing current drilling progress against planned trajectories, enabling problems to be quickly mitigated before they get worse. BP anticipates similar benefits from implementing the PRODML standard (for production data) and RESQML (for reservoir data).

Patrick J. Quinlan, Vice President, Global Leader Oil & Gas Services, Center of Excellence, Capgemini, talked about the development of "digital oil" programs in the upstream business; in particular he spoke to the emergence of 'virtual world' tools - enabling people to create and utilize virtual oil and gas environments (computer game style simulations). This can be used for training and ultimately also for remote experts to understand and resolve real world operational problems.

Vasily Borisov from Kadme talked about how the technology developed by Kadme powers up ArcticWeb - an online portal designed for oil industry specialists, a project started in Norway and sponsored by 6 major international oil companies. A central part of it is the Kadme web framework Whereoil, that continuously harvests predefined data from the relevant authorities and institutions to produce and maintain reliable and high quality information related to Arctic areas.

Nicholas Gibson from Kongsberg Intellifield talked about using established real-time data management standards, workflows and integrated collaboration environments to facilitate real-time decision-making and 24 by 7 collaborative operations for the upstream oil and gas industry.

Andy Sutherland, Executive VP of Paradigm, talked about his company’s approach in developing a subsurface data processing, interpretation and characterization suite of tools. As well as including some of the most advanced technologies in various product segments, the software components support elaborate workflows that address the increasing complexity of modern hydrocarbon reservoirs. The whole process takes place in a very comprehensive 3D visualization environment, making it possible for geoscientists and engineers to construct together solutions that are consistent and precise, within a shorter project time frame than was previously possible.

In addition, IOCOM and Cereno sponsored the meeting and talked about their communication and collaboration technologies, the former via a lunch-time talk/demonstartion and the former via an exhibit.