Some 115 attended the 25th birthday celebration of Energistics (formerly POSC), the Houston-based international upstream standards body. In the event’s keynote, geopolitical analyst and economist Peter Zeihan parlayed the impact of shale oil and gas into a new age of American prosperity. Elsewhere however, Zeihhan foresees a ‘coming global disorder!’ Check out his book on the Accidental Superpower.
CTO Jay Hollingsworth brought the proceedings back down to earth with some stats on membership. Energistics now has 110 corporate members of which 11 are operators, 8 service companies, 14 regulators and 47 software vendors. The three pillars of standards activity are reservoir (Resqml), drilling (Witsml) and production (Prodml). Energistics is in the process of a shift to a Common Technical Architecture (CTA) a.k.a. ‘Standards 2.0.’ The CTA focuses on integration and workflow, with more help for programmers and a new commitment to open source software.
The new technology base of the CTA includes a common Energistics transfer protocol (ETP) and uses Microsoft’s XML-based data object packaging convention, OPC. ETP also removes the need for a server with new endpoint to endpoint data exchange. Also new is the use of Enterprise Architect to model in the OMG*’s UML language. The Prodml spec is now positioned centrally in the digital oilfield space and is positioned as critical for regulatory reporting. Release 2.0 of Resqml represents a complete re-write of the spec for seismic-to-simulation model exchange.
CEO Ross Philo argued that standards reduce data ‘friction’ between people, applications and companies. Standards are even more important in a downturn as companies seek cost savings and efficiencies. ‘Now is the time to drive adoption.’
David Johnson (Petrolink), looking to Witsml’s future, observed that while monitoring is nice, detection of critical situations is better and predicting ahead of the bit is better still. Witsml 2 and the ETP will help here. Also a new ‘decorator’ function will add comments and QC tags to Witsml objects.
Francis Morandini underlined Total’s commitment to Resqml, now used extensively in its internal integrated geoscience framework, more of which in a future edition of Oil IT Journal.
The celebrations concluded with the presentation of the inaugural Gerald E. Hubbard Award of Excellence to Total’s upstream CIO Philippe Malzac, in recognition of his support for Energistics over the years. Read our exclusive interview with Energistics CEO Ross Philo on page 3 of this issue and visit Energistics to download the presentations.
* Object Management Group
© Oil IT Journal - all rights reserved.