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The upstream oil and gas industry is facing another tough year
as it looks to manage weakening economic growth and intensifying
trade tensions against the backdrop of the energy transition. As a
result of this stark market uncertainty, energy operators are
increasingly focused on managing their costs. During this period,
the progress that many had made on digital transformation projects
should not be deprioritised. In fact, better management and
analysis of the vast swathes of data at their disposal could help
energy operators capitalise on the upturn when it arrives.
Energy operators have access to enormous amounts of data through
data subscriptions, e-mailed reports, and internal company
repositories. But how are they storing, consuming and disseminating
this data within their company? The simple answer is that the data
is often so siloed within specific business units or disciplines
that many are not. Data is often left collecting dust in unused
databases, on hard drives or shared file systems.
In today's climate, operators are focused instead on managing
productivity and cost. For example, where are my best producing
wells and my worst? Where can we focus our best efforts toward
enhancing production or shutting in? This is an important focus.
Yet, consolidated, detailed information that could potentially help
reduce the time taken to complete these types of activities, for
example, in this instance, analysis of well performance for field
management, is often not easily accessed or analysed.
When analysing operated well production in one or more leases,
data must be gathered from drilling, production economics,
geoscience, land and financial systems. Extracting and
consolidating these disparate sets of data into meaningful
information may take days or even weeks. Comparing this with
partner or competitive holdings just multiplies the data gathering
process. How do operators gauge the completeness and accuracy of
the gathered data to perform the best analysis?
One of the largest barriers to accomplishing this task -
especially for the smaller operators - is resource. Often, they
don't have the manpower to focus on finding and managing the data.
In addition, expensive resources are required to focus on data
loading and search, not data intelligence.
Leveraging centralized technology to automate much of the data
gathering, conditioning, alignment and distribution allows existing
resources to be more productive by removing the manual efforts
currently involved in these processes.
Automation of data loading and quality control immediately
exposes data anomalies and provides a platform to correct values.
In addition, having an automated hub, provides one location to find
and distribute the most critical data assets to any available
analytics platform. Leveraging centralized, conditioned data in
analytics platforms allows users to make quicker and better
decisions regarding where to spend or save capital.
With the growth in cloud technology, the option to outsource
these data management processes through a managed service enables
further cost and resource savings. The cloud also offers the
possibility of scaling activity up or down, allowing operators to
quickly react to the changing business environment.
It's a tough time for the industry when operators are focused -
quite rightly - on managing cost. However, investment in data
management and analytics, delivered as a managed service, as part
of a wider digital transformation program could help deliver
valuable insights and reduce cost even further over the long-term.
In taking this approach, operators may well find themselves in a
stronger position post-downturn to capitalise on the opportunities
that will no doubt arise.
Posted 02 July 2020 by Nathan Amery, Executive Director, Global Practice Head, EDM for Energy, IHS Markit
