Speaking at the recent Oracle Crystal Ball user group (OITJ Jan 08) Oracle’s oil and gas supremo David Shimbo updated Oracle’s ‘digital oilfield’ (ODO) initiatives (OITJ June 07). Shimbo restated Oracle’s commitment to delivering digital oilfield solutions by providing an E&P data management framework, an application integration architecture and PPDM-based master data management. The architecture will allow oil companies to deploy ‘best-of-breed’ applications with integrated data access across the enterprise.
PPDM
Scope of the ODO is potentially vast—spanning SCADA, G&G, drilling, engineering financials and HSE. An impressive slide showing companies deploying the PPDM data model on Oracle included three majors, four NOCs and a goodly number of independents and international oils—although it was not clear how many of these deploy the ODO per se.
Hyperion
At the heart of the ODO is a PPDM-based Oracle ‘3D spatial data warehouse’ that supports data analysis and Hyperion-based business intelligence (BI). Spatially-selected data can be turned into charts or manipulated in pivot tables—a paradigm that should be familiar to the BI/data mining community.
AspenTech
A collaboration with AspenTech rolls in process control, real time historian data for (potentially) a vertically integrated IT infrastructure spanning upstream, downstream and sales, leveraging Oracle’s Enterprise Asset Management solution. This targets ‘reliability-centered maintenance,’ with applications in refineries, gas plants, pipelines, oilfields and offshore platforms.
KPI
Hyperion is also used to provide oilfield key performance indicators from data sources including CygNet SCADA, ARIES/TOW and eWorkspace (Hyperion) is used for ‘pub sub’ daily reporting. This leverages a ‘Petroleum Essbase* data cube architecture which decomposes into production operations and P&L cubes.
Occidental
Occidental is another ODO implementer with a ‘sandface to sales meter’ project leveraging most all of the above. Newfield has also leveraged ODO components in its ‘360 Portal’ whose components include an electronic well file, an AFE routing and approval workflow and a GIS front end. Newfield has also deployed the PPDM-based master data management/data warehouse ODO component.
Chesapeake
But if there is a single poster child for the ODO it is likely Chesapeake whose ‘Insight’ program is leveraging the ODO to ‘transform discussions from technology to business value.’ Insight, which also spans the whole gamut of oil and gas operations, has Oracle executive management sponsorship. Insight has kicked off with two sub projects—one well focused (again leveraging PPDM) and the other a revamp of Chesapeake’s maintenance activity.
* Extended spreadsheet database (Hyperion).
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