Some 60 attended the Australian meet of the Professional Petroleum Data Management association in Perth this month. Chellie Hailes gave an update on Chevron’s use of the PPDM data model in a master data repository (OITJ January 2008).
Petrosys MD Volker Hirsinger described a more shrink-wrapped approach to PPDM deployment—via Petrosys’ dbMap application. Hirsinger outlined drivers for corporate PPDM master data stores—these include joint venture data sharing, geographically dispersed teams and ‘the quest for a digital oilfield.’ Case histories included one company that wanted to rationalize a substantially duplicated data set following an acquisition and rapid data growth. M&A is a frequent driver in PPDM deployments.
IT challenges vary across deployments, Hirsinger reported some issues catering for Oracle access from diverse Windows desktops. Elsewhere, outsourcing solves a lot of potential problems including loading of legacy data. Petrosys noted that end user acceptance varied from ‘somewhat disappointing,’ through to users becoming so enthusiastic that they were pushing for scope creep in the data management project. Data management can be challenging especially in the face of merging legacy data sets of different CRS. Finding staff to perform geodetic reconciliation can be hard. Overall, PPDM cost was ‘more effective than using a major vendor’.
Steve Jaques (Laredo Energy) and Steve Cooper (PPDM and EnergyIQ) described deployment of a PPDM 3.8 well master data repository alongside a suite of data management tools and ESRI’s ArcGIS Server. The system provides SMT Kingdom project builds to Laredo’s interpreters and well and land data feeds to Laredo’s in-house developed ‘iOps’ data browser. PPDM was selected as a ‘comprehensive, reliable, and flexible’ data model with good data management support including data quality and auditing. Also critical was the fact that PPDM is supported by a large number of vendors and an active community of experts.
Laredo’s database contains over 50,000 well records and close to 10 million production records. Daily updates from IHS run in under five minutes. Laredo encountered a potential issue implementing the PPDM master store on Microsoft’s SQL Server—which has some limitations on the number of foreign keys that can be attached to a single table. Laredo’s PPDM deployment only covers a small subset of the tables and so this was not a fatal issue.
SpectrumData CEO Guy Holmes provided an entertaining analysis of data ‘routes to the graveyard,’ subtitled ‘getting away with murder.’ Data ‘dies’ in three ways—from ‘natural causes,’ i.e. ones that can be anticipated such as media aging, from ‘manslaughter,’ accidental destruction and from ‘premeditated murder.’ Paradoxically, ‘murder’ is the correct way for a data ‘lifecycle’ to end—i.e. with ‘willful destruction of data after rationally considering the timing and method of doing so.’ Natural causes and data manslaughter are the ones to avoid! Homes presented an exhaustive list of ways your data can die and recommended strategies for mitigation. In the case of a failure to implement such a program Holmes suggests you ‘get a good solicitor.’
David Rowland presented Geoscience Australia’s new data management and data entry system, parts of which leverage the PPDM data model. The GA well data download site is at links/0909_2. GA has executed a four person-year effort to QC its well data set. Some 88,000 data values from 2,200 wells have been checked and fixed. Corrections were made to 60% of GA’s well locations, many significant, and thousands of comments on values and data sources were added. GA’s improvement project leveraged the PPDM audit model. The result is a ‘trustworthy data set with verified and verifiable data—eliminating the need for repeated data checking.’ More from www.ppdm.org.
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