Curt Smith, applications director with BP North America demonstrated the use of sensors and Motes—low cost data concentrators and solar powered wireless communications devices. BP is testing sensor and Mote networks from Intel and Rockwell. These have reduced the cost of asset tracking at gas stations and retail sites. One pilot involved the tracking of ‘smart bottles,’ RFID tagged LPG cylinders. In chemical plants and refineries, Motes are set to reduce BP’s shut down costs, estimated at around $420 million/year, improve safety and locate workers in an emergency. Another project—the ‘wireless warehouse’ is encouraging workers to come up with new ideas for RFID use. So far these include real-time supply chain monitoring, cutting inventory cost and simplifying work order management. Smith anticipates ‘multiple’ other benefits, likening the technology to the evolution from clipboard to computer.
Key Energy Services
Bruce Lowe described Key Energy Services’ (KES) well servicing rig data capture project. This targets cost reduction in the well servicing and work over market—worth $2 billion in North America in 2004. Lowe states, ‘If you can measure it you can improve it’. So the project measures rig equipment, activities and real-time data acquisition. The rig data capture project is a ‘pipeline’ for electronic data from service providers on location to the customer, the foundation for digital technologies used in drilling and completions and the source of process data to perform continuous process improvement. Data from remote locations is transmitted to KES’ central database and can be accessed through the KES KeyView portal. The project is helping KES monitor workflow quality, retain its workforce and use data for cost and downtime reduction. Lowe anticipates that in future, there will be more collaboration and performance measurement by operators, well servicing companies and third parties.
Vintage Petroleum
Tulsa-OK headquartered Vintage Petroleum is in the process of integrating its information with an enterprise content management (ECM) system from Livelink. Carrie Daigle stated that ECM lets the corporation ‘benefit from your knowledge when you are gone.’ Key issues for Vintage include turning data to competitive advantage and speeding information delivery. Storing and organizing data electronically ‘creates instant access at your fingertips.’ Using Livelink has minimized risk of information loss to Vintage and improved productivity. The system also scales with changing business needs. The original problems began with invoices; where were they? who saw them? who approved them? Such issues are particularly acute in the light of Sarbanes-Oxley legislation. Vinatge creates cover sheets for invoices which can be faxed or emailed as a pdf file. ECM offers ‘non repudiation’—proof that the recipient has received the invoice. Livelink offers a ‘map’ of where information is located, allowing for online data drill down.
Talisman
Lonnie Chin described Talisman Energy’s ‘Reaper’ GIS portal for browsing and managing structured and unstructured well data. Like many operators, Talisman was challenged by data stewardship/ownership issues and the need for data clean-up. Key to Talisman’s solution is the Master Well Identity (MWI) – a Talisman-defined unique identifier for every well. This allows for consistent access of multiple data sources from assets around the world and has improved cross discipline collaboration.
Saudi Aramco
Marwan Labban described Saudi Aramco’s interpretation environment which offers data transfer, search and processing. Saudi Aramco needed a web services based workflow wrapper for its heterogeneous EXPEC Computer Center. The system, which leverages Petris Winds Enterprise, offers a variety of data exchange services and adapters for E& P data types which support authentication, search (by spidering databases) data validation and transfer.
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