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Barriers Seen on Industry's Digital Technology Path

Posted on: Thursday, 9 February 2006, 06:00 CST

By Dittrick, Paula

Oil companies' growing use of digital technologies could boost world oil and gas reserves, but the industry must overcome barriers to gathering, managing, and sharing data, participants agreed at a recent round table discussion.

David A. Archer, president and chief executive officer of the Petrotechnical Open Standards Consortium (POSC), said barriers involve the quantity and diversity of data sources, issues of timeliness of the information, and also an understanding of the information quality. Oil companies also are concerned about safety, costs, and security, he said.

"This industry has been somewhat slow to adopt new information technology approaches," Archer said. POSC is an international nonprofit corporation founded in 1990 to address open specifications for information modeling, information management, and data and application integration covering the life cycle of exploration and production assets.

His comments came during a Dec. 1 roundtable hosted by software developer Stone Bond Technologies LP of Houston.

Flexibility

"While there has been significant progress in industry communication standards, better use of technology is needed to enable integration and fast, effective data-sharing," Archer said. "The infrastructure must also be flexible to accomodate the dynamic nature of the business."

One solution to integration problems is an emerging trend toward loosely coupled business services, Archer said. The industry is making progress on adopting standards that better enable the exchange of information among partners, customers, and contractors, he said. The best known example being the WITSML family of XML standards for drilling and production reporting.

"Digital energy" is the buzzword for what oil and gas companies used to call their "e-business" (electronic commerce) strategies, roundtable participants agreed. Some companies use the phrase "smart fields" rather than "digital energy," Archer said.

Study results

Stone Bond commissioned Profit Solutions LLC of Houston to conduct a study of 12 oil and service companies about challenges in integration technology.

Hal Green, Profit Solutions managing director, said the industry struggles with how to integrate hundreds of digital systems that must communicate with one another in what he calls "the dynamic nature of the business where things are always changing."

He said, "oil companies can't afford to throw everything out and start all over. They are looking for ways to make all these systems work together." Study participants want "plug-and-play" solutions that also have the capacity to be "reconfigured on the fly, in the field," Green said.

Paula Dittrick

Senior Staff Writer

Copyright PennWell Publishing Company Jan 9, 2006

Source: Oil & Gas Journal

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