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We need patience with OSDU – Simon Kendall

Wednesday, November 29, 2023

It takes a long time to develop oil and gas digital standards, observes Simon Kendall, CEO of Interica. We need patience with OSDU - and recognise that other standards will continue to be used until it reaches maturity

We need to recognise that it takes decades for petroleum standards to mature. 'We should not expect OSDU to become mature over too short a period of time,' said Simon Kendall, CEO of data management company Interica. Meanwhile, 'PPDM and Energistics have an ongoing role.'

He was speaking at the Society for Professional Data Managers November conference.

OSDU has a goal of making it easier to separate data from applications. That has been a goal for many in the industry for decades, it is a continuation of this work, he said.

The work to develop oil and gas data standards goes back to a project to develop a system for unique well identifiers, in 1929 in West Virginia, USA, he said. These unique well identifiers are still used in North America today.

We can also trace back the PPDM Association a long way, back to 1984, when Gulf Oil was bought by Chevron and there was frustration that Chevron could not read all of Gulf Oil's data in its existing software.

So, a group of companies started a project to make a standard data model which the industry would own, rather than data models being owned by individual software companies.

Energistics, another standards organisation, was 'effectively started' in October 1990 by oil companies BP, Chevron, Elf, Mobil, and Texaco, as the Petrotechnical Open Software Corporation (POSC). Its initial role was to try to connect the islands of software and data, he said. Its standards evolved over decades, and during this time they became more mature and more widely used.

Another long-established standard is LAS, originally started in 1992 by the Canadian Well Logging Society as a digital format for well logs.

Today, the attention is on OSDU, developing a 'reference architecture' for oil and gas data, mainly subsurface. We can expect OSDU to also take a long time to evolve, he said.

If you were to plot these standards on a technology 'hype curve,' Mr Kendall would place Energistics and PPDM standards as at the 'plateau of productivity', with PPDM a little more mature than Energistics. whereas OSDU is just coming out of the 'trough of disillusionment', he said.

OSDU

The core purpose of OSDU is to make it easier to separate data and applications, so that data can be kept apart, in a single place, well managed and trusted, and nobody controls it. Discussions leading to OSDU go back to 2018, with a genesis within Shell, he said.

Companies are contributing to the development of OSDU and joining the community, but we are not yet at the point where they are using it to make real life workflows.

One person has joked that there are more 'pilots' being conducted on with OSDU than a large airline has to fly its planes. It is time to move it into production, he said.

After a sort of grace period to allow the OSDU community and standards to develop, there is now more of a drive to implement 'real life operational workflows based on OSDU and cloud working within companies,' he said.

'The maturity of OSDU needs to increase in order to create those modern workflows in the cloud,' he said.

The scope of OSDU is currently limited to geophysics, geology and wells, he said. But that PPDM data model has a much wider scope, additionally covering land rights and financial, facilities and HSE, production data, and geological samples, he said. 'We're going to rely on PPDM to manage data for a period of time, maybe 3-5 years, probably a decade.'

Do people know?

Mr Kendall was very surprised to read a question posted on LinkedIn by a manager of a national data repository, saying that they would like companies to report their core analysis data in a standardised format, and asking if anybody knew of a suitable widely adopted standard.

There was a response from a consultant, suggesting PPDM and OSDU standards, but also sharing a personal view that they were not 'vendor agnostic'.

This consultant was mistaken, Mr Kendall said. The Energistics and now OSDU RESQML standard can be used for core analysis data, is widely adopted, and vendor agnostic.

But the comment indicates a broader problem, that there is not enough awareness about the standards in the geoscience community, he said.

How far with OSDU

Another question is how much data companies should put into OSDU. Although it was originally planned as a repository for all subsurface data, 'I have yet to talk to any company that is talking about a bulk migration into OSDU,' he said.

'Nearly everyone I talk to is talking about subsets of data moving into OSDU, maybe starting with individual assets and workflows.'

For example, it might move all the data for a certain field into OSDU. Or use OSDU for a certain task in the company, such as core analysis, developing its use for specific workflows and disciplines. But meanwhile, we will continue to see legacy standards being used, until new standards have been created and certified.

When companies look to migrate data to OSDU, there can be 5 phases, said. Discovery (of what data you have); analysis of it; working out how to integrate the systems to OSDU such as by loading it into a software tool with an open API such as Power BI; the actual migration; and archiving of data that isn't migrated.

Trusted vs quality

People commonly mix-up the terms 'trusted' and 'quality' when it comes to data, Mr Kendall said. They are not the same thing. One is perception, the other is a fact.

To illustrate the difference, consider that Norway's National Data Repository, DISKOS, once said that any log data included in the database would be deemed to be of high quality, whether or not it actually was.

There are times when people wrongly trust low quality data - or do not trust high quality data, he said.

Energistics and OSDU

Mr Kendall also raised questions of how well the development of formerly Energistics standards will be handled now they are within OSDU.

For example, Energistics' WITSML drilling data standard version 2.1 was published in May 2022. It is 'the only standard that is designed around rig to shore transfer,' he said.

But now Energistics is part of OSDU (since Jan 2022), there is no system in place for certifying it.

'How do we undertake this work in our new community-based world and who certifies these things?' he asked. 'That is something which is going to be a challenge for our industry.'

'Things like the true real time streaming of data will become more and more important.'

There is also a risk the work gone into developing Energistics standards gets eroded, if OSDU is not able to 'move quickly enough to pick up these standards and move things forward,' he said.

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» Interica

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