Imagine sitting in a big shiny control room in the centre of London looking at real-time data of a well site in Iraq. As surreal as it may seem, this has already been done when one operator installed a number of electric submersible pumps in an oil field in Iraq controlled over a satellite from London.
This was just one of the latest technological advancement, industry experts heard about at the IDOC conference in Abu Dhabi last month.
“So you have these guys in the Iraqi oil field sending the data to a different continent. That works just fine. With the digital oil field you can be a metre from the well head or hundreds of kilometres from the wellhead. You need people on the ground for maintanance but if you have all the data and predictive diagnostics coming, then you can plan your maintanance better,” said Andrew Dennant, director for oil and gas Middle East and Africa at Emerson.
The underlying message of the IDOC conference this year was that the digital oil field is now moving from “a reactive into a more predictive and proactive” operational trajectory.
“Ten years ago the digital oil field focused primarily on measurements and control. It was more about the real-time infrastructure. For the past five years the digital oil field has evolved into establishing more integrated operations and collaboration environments, which was the step to link the field to the office”, explained Dileep Divakaran from Schlumburger, speaking at the IDOC conference in Abu Dhabi.
This year regional and global industry experts were presented with an upgraded version 3.0 of the smart field ‘Asset Optimisation’.
“Asset optimisation is the idea of being able to have a closed loop management of the field right from the geology or the reservoir all the way to the point of sale,” said Ali Jama, production solutions business manager for the Middle East at Schlumburger.
In the past couple of years the idea of ‘Asset Optimisation’ has attracted great investment, which in turn has paved the way to future growth.
A Digital Oilfiled Report has estimated that the overall value of the market will reach $38.49bn by the end of this year. While the Middle East stands last on the global implementation curve, the report says the market in the region is also set to expand.
A number of high profile upstream projects have been started as part of national oil and gas companies’ initiatives to digitise their oil fields. One of them is the North Kuwait Jurassic Gas project. Kuwait integrated digital field has been collaborating with Oman, while joint operations on the border between Saudi Arabia and Kuwait have also started gaining more prominence.
“The technologies in the implementation of digital oilfields have drastically improved within the last decade and regional national oil companies are reaping the rewards by being able now to optimise production, increase recovery, and implement intelligent integrated fields,” said Edgar Antonio, business manager for MENA at Wood Group Kenny.
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“The oil industry has always been technological but it has become much more computerised. A lot of the oil companies can bring up 3D analysis of oil fields and make projections based on that. It allows you to walk around the field from a room and do things that were unimaginable even ten years ago”, Rob MacGregor, CEO of Glasspoint, believes.
More new DOF solutions have also been developed. Honeywell, for example has recently launched a new software, the Digital Suites, which is estimated to boost production performance up to 5%.
Yiannis Bessiris, regional business leader at Honeywell, said:“The 5% increase will actually come from utilising the digital intelligence, which actually means capturing, managing and analysing your operational production database.
“Final decisions will be based on the best available data. On top of that we will be able to act in real time and minimise the cost of any action.
“The flow of information will be instant, the collaboration will be on a level we have never seen before and experts, probably somewhere in the US and Europe, will be able to detect a problem in the Middle East and actually be able to send a solution before any trip happens, ” he added.
Commenting on the region’s progress in smart field technologies, Bessiris said: “The Middle Eastern region is catching up. We see a lot of our customers now coming to understand the data they have to make better decisions. And I think the market has an excellent potential to grow substantially in the next three to five years.”
The digital oil field is now being marketed as a business value generator for the industry. To actually translate the benefits of the digital oil field into monetary results, companies need to do much more than simply buy the technology.
“I think the big transformation the digital oil field enables above all else is that it moves us from producing barrels of oil per day to dollars and profit an hour. The key is when you turn it from being a production decision to being a business decision. Then you start to win,” said Andrew Dennant from Emerson.
“Look at the difference the digital oil field makes around the world. In offshore North Sea and in Norway they get recovery rates around 70% of the oil in the ground. If you look at other parts of the world, where they have traditional ways of doing oil fields, they get a third of that.”
But while companies do see the business opportunity in implementing the new technology and framework, what they often overlook is the need for structural and management changes that come with it.
“If you just implement some technology and do not change the way people work, all you have is more technology. You do not get the business results. The two things have to go hand in hand.”
“In order to make the digital oil field work it is a business transformation you are implementing. The first thing you need is a vision. You start with a vision on what your business needs from the digital oil field. The next thing to do is to understand what you have today and that will drive the technology you have to choose”, says Dennant.
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“That is where you have to look at the shape of the organisation and make sure that it is structured in a way and enables you to do the things that need to be done in the new collaborative digital oil field environment,” he added.
On the question of how advanced or behind the region is in terms of digitising its oil fields, Dennat said: “When the easy oil was here you did not need the digital oilfield. Now that the easy oil is gone you have to get smarter to get it out of the ground. Different companies have embraced the digital oil field at different times so everyone is on different places in their journey. That journey will lead to potentially different places depending on the geology they have and the business outcomes they are looking for.”
“Every business is different and every oil field is different. There are different operating constraints so you don’t just buy one-off digital oilfield. It is specific to what you need,” he added.
But despite the fact that technology does the bulk of the work, eventually all the data ends up in the hands of people and this has its own challenges, as Dennant explains.
“When the data comes in, the numbers are crunched down by the models, the models know what to do. What the models cannot handle, that is where humans are going to come in.”
“Machines can be smart but they are not intelligent. So it is about presenting the tiny subset of problems that cannot be solved automatically to the right group of people,” said Dennant.
A key game change for the industry, the digital oilfield will aim to bring in more collaboration between different disciplines. Production operation and reservoir management staff, engineers and field development teams will all have to work together, Ali Jama from Schlumburger believes.
But the problem is that this will require a change in management and training and the oil and gas industry, especially in this region, often takes change very conservatively. While more collaboration would clearly present major benefits to the industry, the process of changing an already established work culture and old work habits could also take valuable time and resources.
“Convincing people to be able to work in a new way and adapt to new technology, it’s not as easy as it may seem. That normally is the biggest hurdle,” said Jama.
“If there is going to be a shift in the journey of the digital oil field, it is going to be that we will have to adapt to the use of integrated platforms. These platforms will go from surface to subsurface workflows and away from silo organisational barriers bringing more collaboration and teams working togetherto be able to deliver the targets for the given company. I think that is where the digital oilfield of the future will gear towards,” he added.
What DO WE MEAN BY THE DIGITAL OIL FIELD?
Also known as i-field and smart field, the digital oil field involves IT, automation and instrumentation technologies, as an improvement to the existing technologies in the oil and gas industry. It is designed to make the analysis faster and easier and to provide more realistic image of the reservoir and the availability of resources. It also optimises production and renders much safer operations with the use of remote surveillance and collaborated environments.
Top FOUR benefits of the DOF
– Higher production rates
– Slower reservoir life decline rates
– Lower maintenance costs
– Safer work
