According to BP’s Tarun Chandrasekhar, ‘Managing data is like losing weight. One-off projects are about as successful as crash diets. Both these goals need lifestyle change.’ This can be achieved with ‘sustainable, free-standing processes and systems that are embedded in the E&P lifecycle.’ Geospatial data management is under BP’s overall data management discipline with a cross-functional governance board. Geospatial data is divvied up into various categories, ‘spatialized,’ ‘mastered’ and ‘derived’ each with its own transformation and loading workflow . Special attention is given to coordinate reference system handling. BP keeps tabs on its complex array of GIS data stores by monitoring database and server performance with Vestra’s GeoSystems monitor while usage is monitored with Voyager GIS (2013/10/15). Pipeline centerlines, facilities, and equipment are housed in a PODS/Esri Spatial data store.
Chandrasekhar warns that a common problem in data management projects is underestimating the time and effort required. A typical ‘18 month’ program can easily stretch to over three years requiring extra resources or worse, a reduction of scope. GIS implementation affects multiple critical processes, making management of change hard. Sometimes it takes so long to implement the technology that by the time training starts, the technology is already outdated. BP gets around this by ‘putting people first,’ focusing on getting the right skills in the right roles and establishing geospatial governance across functions. In fact, ‘technology is the lowest priority.’
Mark Priest reported on RasGas’ ongoing effort to measure the value of subsurface data governance—initially by computing and allocating a monetary value to the time saved in a 2006 volume reporting and well back-allocation data project. This saw a move away from an ‘unsustainable and error prone’ legacy method based on spreadsheets and individuals. This had led to multiple versions of the truth and large amounts of engineers’ time spent searching for and ‘wrestling’ rather than analyzing data. The resulting solution (applications and a centralized database for measured and allocated volumes) cost some $1.4 million to implement but, over a 7 year period from 2006 to 2012, has ‘earned’ $1.9 million in time saved. Further leverage of the solution outside of the WBA project brought over $3 million of extra value for free. The subsurface is now selling the value of the solution to other parts of the business and to RasGas’ shareholders and has embarked on a ‘Value Calculation 2.0’ project with more ambitious goals.
Trudy Curtis presented on the latest PPDM 3.9 release which sees a 58% hike in its table count (to 2700) and a corresponding rise in the number of attributes (up 87% to 71,000). The new model introduces constraints (such as units of measure) that make the model more robust, support for the concepts defined by the ‘What is a Well’ and ‘Well Status’ work groups. The shale boom has driven two new subject areas covering source rock geochemical analytics. Better support for raw directional survey data has also been included along with master data functionality. Wes Baird’s talk highlighted the ‘sweeping’ changes in the 3.9 architecture along with advice on how and when to upgrade. Read the PPDM presentations here.
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