Speaking at the Energistics WITSML Public Forum and Exhibition* in Houston earlier this year, Energistcs CEO Randy Clark bemoaned the fact that although WITSML is available to some 90% of high value, real-time, difficult drilling operations, ‘the value of WITSML is barely known to industry at large.’ For some companies though, such as StatoilHydro, WITSML is becoming ‘business as usual’ for real-time drilling operations. These companies are saying ‘no WITSML, no work for you!’
BP ‘s Julian Pickering presented an analysis suggesting an ROI of 200% for real-time standards and payback within a week! BP’s WITSML systems are tested in SAIC’s Aberdeen, UK facility for security. BP is also looking for ‘renaissance’ engineers who combine knowledge of their data with a desire to ‘use something besides a pivot table in Excel.’
Total described its Alwyn field, discovered in 1974, as a brownfield now entering the ‘craftsman’ phase. Alwyn is a test bed for new technologies including WITSML. One problem with new technology is that in a greenfield, ‘it’s too new’ and in a brownfield ‘it’s too late!’ More on Total’s Alwyn testbed in next month’s Oil IT Journal.
Wellstorm showed improvements to its automated rig state detection system and Moblize demonstrated wireless remote control of directional drilling. Geologix has defined a WITSML mudlog object containing information on lithology, formation top and show data. Such orphan data types have been bottlenecked in the past from poor formatting and the fact that they are not usually available outside of emails. Perfomix’ ‘PetroSocial’ social networking/communities of practice alerts management during geosteering projects. The analytical toolset comes with pre-configured cubes, exposed as web parts and portlets in SAP or SharePoint. Web 2.0 technology now replaces the morning meeting. Schlumberger reports that it now uploads 60,000 WITSML files per month to its Interact site and has 60 Operational Service Centers for internal QC of drilling and production data. Baker Hughes uses WITSML internally to manage job data and build up an electronic well file at job start up. The goal is to reduce the number of interfaces between storage and operation data. Challenges include applications that don’t interface with WITSML servers, large data sets, and building additional query functions to retrieve data by depth range.
* www.oilit.com/links/0906_10.
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