The most popular sessions at the 2022 EU Community for Information Management (ECIM) conference in Haugesund, Norway were those featuring the latest developments on the OSDU front, more of which in our report elsewhere in this issue. But for us, the highlight of the 25th edition of ECIM was Henning Lillejord’s presentation of ConocoPhillips’ subsurface warehouse, developed to support the ongoing development of the North Sea Ekofisk giant oil field.
Ekofisk was discovered in 1969. 50 plus years on, its remaining reserves still qualify it for ‘giant’ status. The Norwegian regulator recently extended its production license out to 2048. This has justified the development of a major subsurface data warehouse to capture historical information from the field’s 500 well bores, production and injection activity, horizontal wells and satellite field developments. ConocoPhillips is still trying to figure why Ekofisk is such a great field. Its best well started producing in 1990 and produced for 30 years without a workover. Why? Where is the waterfront? Answering such questions (and many others) is key to making predictions about future performance and informing development.
Lillejord acts as a ‘data ambassador’ for users, centralizing well master data, business logic, and QC rules. Previously, common workflows involving production and geological logs would be done with Excel. ‘And re-done every time they were needed!’ Now, E&P data has been gathered into a data warehouse that also supports operations and maintenance. But the neat aspect of Lillejord’s approach is that no new tools were needed to build the data warehouse. The main enabler was SAS Institute’s software (with help from Tibco Spotfire) which has been used in-house for years in the finance department. Now log and production data is ‘fresh and integrated’. The end user goes straight to the warehouse. The warehouse ingests data from Petrel Studio, WellView, Energy Components, OFM, PI and more, presenting information in a ‘well on a page’ format. A similar ‘field on a page’ function exposes well tops, tests, NPD data and 4D seismics. SAS has shifted focus to the opinion of the end user as opposed to that of the IT department. Domain understanding is the key.
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