Compiling historical well and field data into a consistent, easily accessible electronic format has saved PDO substantial project time and costs, and has increased user confidence in the data upon which critical decisions are made.
Nasser Saif Al-Mahrooqi, Petroleum Development Oman; and Richard Turner, Fugro Data Solutions
Increasingly, oil companies are applying systems to reduce their operational costs, avoid drilling rig and/or field production downtime and minimize their overall risk. This is especially prevalent in the Middle East, particularly in those countries where joint public-private sector initiatives are at work. To help achieve these goals, a number of national oil companies have joined with their co-developers to engage professional providers for handling, storing and processing of large amounts of wellbore data, among other key databases. In Oman, the majority state-owned Petroleum Development Oman (PDO) and one of its partners, Fugro, have taken proactive steps to manage wells and whole reservoirs more successfully by efficiently managing the data associated with these projects.
BACKGROUND
As the volume of oilfield exploration and production data grows, it becomes increasingly difficult to manage, store and access that data efficiently. Poorly managed and hard-to-access data declines in value with the passage of time, while accessible data can lead to new discoveries. The cataloging and storage of oil company data represents a significant investment in the search for oil and gas. Archived data can contain crucial information with substantial intrinsic value, but much of the material might exist in obsolete formats and be recorded on inaccessible media (e.g., floppy disk). Converting these data types into modern alternatives provides the following results:
• Reduction of inaccessible paper and analogue records
• Storage of data in digital format
• Readily available searchable data.
Unavailable information can force oil companies to acquire duplicate data at considerable expense. When this data is managed properly, the savings made in terms of time to access this critical information is tremendous, and the acquired confidence by the technical staff in the quality and reliability of its data drastically improves both efficiency and effectiveness. However, the challenge of data management is often exacerbated by the age of these records; change in ownership of the assets because of divestment or acquisition by other companies; and the differing data management practices across global organizations.
While analyzing its data management needs, PDO decided to perform a field- and asset-wide review of its well data. As Oman’s foremost E&P company, accounting for 70% of the sultanate’s oil production and nearly all of its gas output (Fig. 1), PDO needed to analyze data from more than 7,000 wellbores.
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Fig. 1. Map of PDO operational areas.
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Oman’s rise as a successful oil and gas producing nation began with a geological survey of the country in 1925, which found no conclusive evidence of oil. Twelve years later, however, when geologists began intensively searching for oil in neighboring Saudi Arabia, Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) was granted a concession area for the exploration of oil in Oman. The E&P operations were to be run on behalf of IPC by Petroleum Development (Oman and Dhofar) Ltd. The first economic find of oil was made in 1962, and the first consignment of oil was exported in 1967.
Thus, PDO’s well data was in a wide range of formats and media. Archiving the data into centralized repositories was not a high priority during the years of rapid expansion, and, as a result, later generations of engineers were spending an excessive amount of their time searching for and quality checking data, as files were often incomplete, duplicated or separated. Consequently, the petroleum engineers were often making decisions based on untrustworthy data.
IMPLEMENTATION
The operator knew that if the files were collected and compiled into a consistent and complete format and then made easily accessible in electronic format, it would save substantial project time and costs. In addition, it would increase user confidence in the data upon which critical decisions were being made. To accomplish these objectives, the operator decided to undertake the project with Fugro’s data management group.
Following initial discussions with PDO, a small, specialized team of Fugro data experts was deployed to PDO’s Fahud Collaboration Centre in Mina al Fahal. The facility brings together petroleum engineers, well engineers and data management specialists as well as geologists and operations staff from the interior and the coast in a virtual working environment. It uses real-time communication technology to enable data sharing and to create a collaborative working model that is helping PDO maximize the potential of intelligent fields.
The primary aim was to assess and confirm the current data management situation through a data audit. This audit was accomplished through data sampling and extensive discussions with petrophysical staff.
On completion of the data audit, a high-level work plan with several objectives was developed by the service company in conjunction with PDO. Critically, it was decided to:
• Re-establish data management best practice in the organization
• Define the data needs of the users
• Develop the data management community through training and application of dedicated staff
• Address the large-scale legacy data issues and resolve them to restore the users’ confidence in and the accessibility of well data.
The project commenced with an 18-month pilot study on Fahud Field, the country’s largest oil field. The aim of the study was to prove the concept and streamline workflows, and it formed the basis of the final workscope—i.e., companywide data management.
The Fahud pilot study was successful in delivering digital well files to PDO’s subsurface staff, and the decision was made to extend the same working practices to the remainder of PDO’s well files. The upscaling of the work effort also offered an opportunity to retrain a number of PDO staff in data management techniques. The service company worked with the operator to deliver these data improvement goals.
The project commenced with the location of all well file documents for more than 7,000 wellbores. This search required extensive efforts involving large numbers of the operator’s petrophysical staff in conjunction with the service company’s data management experts.
When engineers don’t have a centralized facility for storing and retrieving critical data, the engineers tend to retain data on their worksite desktop or laptop, in their desk drawers and on adjacent shelves. Problems arise when data is required by several teams simultaneously. Duplicates and missing files can become unmanageable very quickly.
Once information was gathered from various locations, the well files were rigorously sorted into a pre-defined and consistent filling system. An extensive cataloging effort was undertaken to capture all the necessary metadata about each record. This cataloging process ensures that all the key attributes of a record are captured, allowing subsequent rapid and accurate searching against a wide array of variables.
During this process, it is critical that a suitable data model be used and industry standards followed. However, these are often modified to reflect local requirements or expected future needs. Cataloging also requires knowledge of the data type being handled.
A well-trained and experienced cataloging team can rapidly sort through vast quantities of data. Quality control provides statistics that are recorded and used to derive performance goals and targets. These cataloged files are then scanned using industry-leading scanning equipment that is capable of scanning wide-format well logs and is also capable of scanning pages with a very high throughput rate.
Fugro used its proprietary cataloging software Traxx to handle the population of the data model by the cataloging team. The same software could be also used to search for items and manage PDO’s physical data store.
Once a digital version of the file was created, usually in Portable Document Format (PDF), it was then uploaded to a document management system. This same system is used to manage the metadata of the items and allows rapid retrieval of the document.
ENHANCING OPERATIONS THROUGH DATA MANAGEMENT
After sorting, cataloging, scanning and uploading the records into PDO’s document management system, information from each well file was used to enhance the quality and quantity of archived well information. Digital well logs were verified and raw data was extracted corresponding to information from sensors measuring the physical properties of the downhole formations.
A complete set of accessible, standard-format data curves was carefully created for each borehole interval. This data is particularly valuable to geoscientists evaluating the geological and petrophysical properties of oil reservoirs.
While completing their data management activities onsite, the service company experts were involved in recruiting and training client personnel to operate the new systems and to update the database following contract completion. PDO placed tremendous emphasis on ensuring that this capability was retained and developed in its local staff.
This training was critical in ensuring data management best practice throughout the organization. Once the final digital product was uploaded to PDO’s corporate database, the data was immediately searchable, saving the operator time, space and money. Information that was previously hard to find and at risk of being lost, misplaced or damaged by flood or fire became instantly retrievable at the touch of a button by multiple simultaneous users.
Having a master data set that is accessible simultaneously by multiple users ensures that data is secure, that time to access the data is minimal and that work can be carried out on the data concurrently. This saves the customer time in terms of its expensive technical resources and ensures that decisions are not made on incomplete or superseded data sets.
In addition, electronic data can be securely stored with permission-based access, easily backed up and controlled in disaster recovery plans.
In parallel to the legacy data project, PDO commenced a Data Services Office (DSO) project. This office was responsible for handling all well log data that entered the organization. Its objective was to ensure that data was delivered in the correct format, and that it was checked for completeness and correctness against contractual and minimum data standards.
This process was cyclical with the contractors and effectively provided a quality checkpoint for all well log data acquired by PDO. It was then passed into the petrophysical community, who could use it knowing that its quality was acceptable and that its arrival had been correctly registered into a tracking system, and the data loaded into the corporate database.
The process has also expanded with the introduction of a Document Control Team with responsibility to manage, control quality and upload crucial reports and documents to the corporate document repository, Livelink. This proactive approach ensures that the common data management issues that led to the requirement for the legacy data project are unlikely to re-occur.
CONCLUSION
The success of the Data Services Office initiative for log data led to best practices and similar processes being put in place for other subsurface data types. The one-stop-shop model for data delivery has reinforced compliance throughout data workflows from data acquisition to interpretation and utilization. In addition, the concept is now being assessed for other data types to ensure that a similarly rigorous approach to data management will be pushed into the wider organization with similar gains.
Ongoing performance in both the Data Services Office and legacy projects is measured through a series of key performance indicators (KPIs) relating to the throughput of data in each stage of the process; accuracy and completeness; and quality.
Since the DSO was charged with the task of monitoring log data acquisition, delivery, quality control and archival, the KPIs that were designed to measure delivery and quality metrics have shown a marked improvement. Prior to the establishment of the DSO, the company did not have any means at its disposal to measure such performance. The need to balance resources in each operational stage of the legacy process requires that throughput be measured against these KPIs. This balancing ensures the smoothest possible workflow and minimizes bottlenecks as data moves from stage to stage.
On similar projects in other parts of the world, customer feedback indicated that the increased availability of online documents has resulted in a 65% increase in document search “hits” recorded over a two-year period.
What has become apparent and has formed a key part of the ongoing project is the necessity of entrenching best practice and data management awareness throughout the organization. When staff members realize the value of the data they are using and recognize the need to handle it systematically and rigorously, the resulting data management practices continue to add value to the data, the information derived from it and the organization as a whole.
In PDO, this awareness was identified as a critical component to the project’s success at a very early stage. It has been achieved through knowledge transfer sessions, training and internal communications. It remains a critical factor in the success of the data management system. 
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THE AUTHORS
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Nasser Saif Al-Mahrooqi is the Manager of Petroleum Engineering Data Management for Petroleum Development Oman. A graduate of the University of Plymouth (United Kingdom) in telecommunication engineering, he has held various positions in information management and technology, well engineering and subsurface arenas. He represents PDO on the Shell data management leadership team for subsurface information management. |
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Richard Turner has more than 14 years of experience within the survey and E&P data management sectors in a variety of roles. A former UK Royal Marine, he spent four years in operational roles working offshore and onshore throughout Africa and Asia before moving to Houston in 2001, where he worked in both commercial and management roles at Fugro Chance. In 2008, he moved to the UK to head the commercial department at Fugro Data Solutions. Mr. Turner holds an MBA and is a member of the Americas Petroleum Survey Group, Hydrographic Society and the Marine Technology Society. |
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