Speaking at the 2023 ECIM Data Management conference in Haugesund, Norway, Equinor’s Jan Harald Mortensen reported progress on OSDU* in Equinor. The talk was titled, ‘How Equinor is putting OSDU to work’ but Mortensen started with a ‘spoiler alert’ that ‘we are not there yet!’ Equinor has spent three years trying to implement OSDU as a key element of its data platform. Last year’s objective was for OSDU to be a component of Equinor’s ‘Omnia’ subsurface data platform. Earlier in 2023, the hope was for an ‘operational OSDU’ by the year end. What has been achieved is a vast data loading campaign with some 20 million well datasets. The current focus is on seismic SEG-Y and metadata. But, as of today, there are zero end users on board. Mortensen asked rhetorically ‘should we stop?’ ‘No! we are enablers!’
So far OSDU has been an IT-driven project, but now the business domains are starting to wake up with actual use cases. ‘Will we be there by year end 2023?’ ‘Maybe, interest is starting to grow. But resources are an issue. Currently all the work on the OSDU data platform is being done by Equinor, ‘We are doing everything … this does not scale’. Equinor needs to open the platform to data providers and let them push data into OSDU. There is also an issue with data stakeholders for business domains and Omnia**. A scalable process is needed and this does not come out of the box with OSDU.
Returning to the end users, the data consumers, Mortensen asked enigmatically, ‘What is the actual intention of the OSDU platform?’ To answer this, Equinor needs to talk, cooperate and contribute to the TOG/OSDU Forum. Internally, work can start small on ‘40 year old data problems’, by making a small in-house built tool to ingest data in OSDU. There is value in learning the technology. Standardization is driving forwards with OSDU’s API-driven communication, definitions and schemas. But Mortensen warns, even if we are now 100% OSDU standardized and schema validated, that does not mean we are interoperable! There is plenty of wriggle room in modeling from a data definition. Today, there is a lot of arm waving and folks saying that it will be a lot harder than anyone thought. Mortensen advocates leveraging work arounds, taking short cuts and ‘reading the schema’. Driving interoperability is not easy. Why OSDU? Mortensen quoted JF Kennedy’s rationale for the 1969 moon landing, ‘we do things not because they are easy, but because they are hard!’
* The Open Subsurface Data Universe.
** Mortensen described Omnia as Equinor’s ‘cloud journey’, observing too that, ‘there are many answers to the question ‘what is Omnia?’!’
More from ECIM in our next issue.
Speaking at the 2023 OPC Day in the OPC UA for Energy Strategy session, Espen Krogh (Prediktor) and Chris Muench (C-Labs) introduced the OPC Foundation Energy (currently under construction!) initiative. OPC-FE is primarily concerned with the energy transition where multiple sources must combine to provide reliable, affordable and sustainable energy. Here, a challenge is the lack of standards. OPC FE is establishing numerous working groups to define data exchange and model standards for the broader energy sector. These are to support connectivity of energy-related systems, services and devices for energy production from diverse sources including solar, wind, hydro, nuclear and fossil. The ambitious initiative is to cover energy conversion, transport, storage and consumption.
One workgroup of interest to the oil and gas vertical is the Carbon Capture, Storage and Reporting workgroup, chaired by Microsoft’s Erich Barnstedt with support from founding members: TGS-Prediktor, Equinor and Beckhoff. Alongside OPC, the workgroup has representation from CESMII, and VDMA. The plan is to develop or repurpose several OPC UA information models for CO2 capture, storage, transport and injection. Metering of sequestered CO2 to evaluate permanently stored volumes is also under study. Current focus is the active Northern Lights CCS project with an initial standard for liquified CO2 storage. An overarching Energy Harmonization Workgroup is to assure common definitions and constructs are used across the various energy related working groups, leveraging earlier work on energy semantics including IEC 61850 and derived specifications.
OPC is predominantly a standard for manufacturing as witnessed by its flagship industrial supporters. It has in the past had an oil and gas presence with notably the MDIS Master Control System (MCS) . Also there is seemingly ongoing OPC activity relating to possible convergence of The Open Group’s Open Process Automation Forum and OPC UA Field eXchange (OPC UA FX).
In trying to track what is going on with OSDU*, we regularly visit the public facing home page at The Open Group. Earlier in its existence, OSDU published fairly regular updates in the format of press releases, newsletters and blog posts. The newsletters seem to have stopped in 2022, also the year of the last press. The latest blog is an interview with Patrick Kelly, Chevron, in his role as the newly elected OSDU chair. TOG’s interviews consist mainly of softball questions like, ‘How important is collaboration to you?’, ‘What does the word community mean to you?’ or ‘What is a business philosophy or principle that you follow?’, which do not really offer much insight into OSDU’s activity. A missed opportunity for the newly elected chair?
There is an upcoming OSDU Forum Member Meeting to be held in Houston, on October 30, too late for this issue, so we thought we would do some traffic analysis on the OSDU website to see what’s happening, and what’s not.
The member count currently stands at a staggering 231 corporates. Membership costs between $2,750 and $22,000 with an additional ‘sustainability fee’ in the range of $0 to $40,000 payable to The Open Group. However you do the math, OSDU is not short of cash. Better still for the organization is the fact that much of the work is done for free by its membership. The Open Group just provides the Forum infrastructure and hosts the meetings and website.
Talking of which, it is not just the communications from OSDU that appear to have stalled. Some of the activity announced in recent years is not showing much sign of life. The public-facing OSDU ‘Innovation Marketplace’ has only seen three solicitations of which one, Shell’s request for ‘data management tooling that is built and hosted on the OSDU cloud’ is interesting in that it specifies a format agnostic ‘ideal solution’ solution that covers multiple data domains, combining specialist external data services into a single workflow’. Shell’s ideal solution should also ‘avoid managed service solutions or solutions that require us to use a 3rd party cloud environment’. Good luck with that! The three Shell solicitations are now closed.
Another facet of the OSDU Forum website is the bravely-announced scope creep that is evident from the ‘Energy Types’ tab on the home page. Here we see tantalizing developments in OSDU services for windfarms, for photovoltaic, for geothermal and CCUS. All four of which appear to be stuck with a November 2021 report of an ‘MVP N°1’. BTW, the agenda for the upcoming Houston member meet mentions none of these energy transition OSDU services.
And so to this issue’s lead on Equinor’s talk at ECIM. Actually what struck me even more than the ‘no end users’ reveal was Mortensen’s entreaty-cum-cry-for-help ‘What is the actual intention of the OSDU platform?’ What can one say? Can 230 plus companies and thousands of OSDU hackers be barking up the wrong tree?
* The Open Subsurface Data Universe.
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