Last
November we reported from the SPE digital energy technical section that
digital had achieved its goal and now sees full acceptance. The message
from a slightly downbeat Intelligent Energy (IE), held this month in
Utrecht, might almost be that digital/intelligent energy has gone
beyond acceptance and is now menaced with decline. Sustainability of
digital projects is now the watchword and here, two diverging solutions
are proposed. Either work on the people side of the equation with
management of change and other ‘soft’ stuff, or automate and get people
out of the picture.
Klaus Mueller (Shell)
enumerated some IE successes, the well and reservoir management (WRM)
toolkit (OITJ Nov 2013) and gas breakthrough control (GBC). The latter
has ‘made people’s lives easier’ by stopping flaring and night time
driving for tests and maintenance. The GBC units (130 installed to
date) include an audio video headset, RFID sensors, heart beat monitors
and ‘man down’ alerts. Elsewhere IE initiatives have suffered from
challenges to their ownership and sustainability. Some have fallen into
disrepair. One IE poster child, the collaborative work environment is
only realizing 50% of its potential. Challenges include finding people
who want to use the technology. One GBC controller went down for a year
resulting in 55k bbl of deferred production. There is a need to do more
to inspire people.
Statoil ’s
Halvor Kjørholt came out in favor of automation. So far IE has impacted
drilling safety and capability but not efficiency. There is a need for
a revolution in offshore drilling with real time well diagnostics and
accurate information of what is happening downhole. This will be
enabled by drilling sequence automation—moving drilling in the
direction of process control. Such technology is being installed on a
North Sea field. Managed pressure drilling in particular needs more
integration with drilling control systems to detect small in and
outflows to avoid ‘well control situations.’ Robots are to replace
today’s drilling systems. Kjørholt backed up this claim showing a video
of Norwegian Robotic Drilling System’s
drill floor robot putting nails into a bottle. Robots will ‘talk to
each other’ and organize efficient ways of working. Liner and casing
drilling and MWD will mean that wells can be made in a single run
including cementing.
Mike Ryan described ExxonMobil
Canada’s aspirations of lower cost, safer, less complex
operations—again enabled by automation and unmanned operations. In
another session, Klaus Mueller stated that we need to get humans out of
loop. Inter alia
to address the old chestnut of data management and get the most out of
our facilities. Mueller bemoaned the fact that people don’t show up for
meetings, and that budgets for change management have been cut.
At
the last IE in 2012 we took some speakers to task for not reporting the
software tools of the trade they used in their work. The situation has
not changed, in fact this year, several talks were little more than
sales pitches for specific products. These curiously stuck by the
unwritten ‘no product names’ rule that meant that some investigation
was required to understand what was actually on offer. Of course the
situation is different for speakers from the majors who unabashedly
plug their own products and projects. For instance Shell’s GeoSigns
interpretation package is ‘unique in the industry.’ BP even has its own
® to ‘Realtime.’
NASA’s
Brian Muirhead provided an entertaining account of Mars (the planet not
the oilfield) exploration and showed a spectacular video, ‘Seven minutes of terror’ showing
the entirely automated landing of the Curiosity rover. The automation
theme was duly picked up on by several subsequent speakers. Muirhead
praised the work of the all female team that did the wiring on
Curiosity. But calling them the ‘seven dwarfs’ showed that NASA is as
macho a business as oil and gas.
Of
course Mars exploration was not all rosy, witness the Mars climate
orbiter that smacked into the planet back in 1998. This was only partly
down to the widely reported units of measure bust, which NASA’s
engineers had actually spotted, but failed to communicate to the
operators. This ‘people side’ failing was not picked up on although it
could have been. Muirhead’s entreaty to ‘take risk but do not fail’ was
adroitly questioned and found wanting.
Merrick System’s
Kemal Farid emphasized the uniqueness of shale operations which face
data management challenges from the large number of wells, fewer
engineers per well and an environment where ‘things move quickly.’ In
shale operations, not everything is automated. Pumpers work on laptops
sitting in their trucks. While HSE and compliance can’t be automated,
elsewhere the aim is to automate as much as possible. Production data
goes into the hydrocarbon allocation system for aggregation where it
may be subject to complex production sharing agreements and reporting
needs. Farid moved on to a case study of JW Operating, a ‘fast paced,
lean shale operator.’ The unnamed solution to JW’s needs we believe was
Merrick’s own production software for unconventionals.
We were excited to see newcomer Yokogawa
at the show and chatted with their representative who spoke of the
company’s new push into several verticals with a software offering
tuned to oil and gas. We were handed a USB stick which was supposed to
have some ‘teasers’ for the initiative. A tease indeed. The stick was
blank—at least as far as I could tell although I think that stuxnet may
be running on my dishwasher now.
Sunil Jose revealed that Baker Hughes’s
operational security was inspired from airport security—from a visit
with security experts from New Orleans airport. Baker’s risk management
leverages a similar real time common view of operations that is
standardized across silos. On the impressive triple monitors showing
video feeds, production numbers and GIS you could just make out the
unmentionable product name—WellLink, now a threat detection device with
the capability of precursor detection—going back in time and
re-creating events for forensic analysis.
BP’s
David Feineman stated that digital oilfield maturity is ‘highly
variable.’ Organizational politics has a significant imprint on digital
oilfield maturity and its adoption and improvement. The problem set is
many dimensioned and can be described as a ‘wicked problem.’ The
term comes from systems thinking of the 1980s where a class of
intractable, poorly specified problems were identified. These typically
have unique solutions i.e. one solution is not applicable to a similar
problem elsewhere (in other words, your mileage may vary). Enter
Feineman’s digital oilfield maturity matrix with ‘dimensions’ of
people, process, technology, strategy and governance and maturity
levels from 1 to 5. Requiring people to change is the curse of the
wicked problem. Another issue is rapidly evolving technology in IT and
a slowly changing process/automation community. Digital may trigger
emotional responses and is threatening to organizational structures,
upsetting power, status, resource allocation and decision making.
Progressing digital oilfield maturity will require improvements in all
dimensions and the use of ‘storytelling’ to transfer learnings.
One
of the earlier reactions to things ‘smart’ from the drilling community
was, ‘I don’t want jewelry in my well.’ In other words, no fancy
completions with downhole control to go wrong. A sign of how things
have changed was given by Martyn Morris, introducing BP’s latest ‘field of the future,’ the Angolan PSVM FPSO.
This, the biggest deepwater development in world, is going to have ‘all
the jewelry in from the start.’ Such as, the advanced collaboration
environment, downhole flow control, subsea sand detectors and BP’s Isis
integrated subsurface information system. Thanks to acoustic monitoring
and multi phase flow meters ‘we know exactly what’s coming out of every
well.’ 4D seismic has replaced testing to track water movement and
changes in the overburden. Slug control has been problematical in riser
from the distant Saturno field. Here a software driven slug controller
has proved successful, despite initial skepticism from operators.
Gerald Schotman’s (Shell)
plenary covered familiar ground for Oil IT Journal readers in
PowerPoint spectacular. IE is on a crusade to satisfy future world
energy demand, fuelled by population growth and more energy consuming
middle classes. Energy needs a ‘man on the moon’ project. Shell’s
contributions include work with PGS fiber optic seismics and
‘GeoSigns,’ Shell’s ‘unique’ proprietary interpretation package. Those
wishing to share their intellectual property with Shell can log on to
the Shell TechWorks site. More from IE in next month’s Journal and from the conference home page.
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