Oil & gas companies are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on extracting petabytes of data from their operations, but are not utilising that data efficiently and to its full potential, according to Niall O’Doherty, business development manager at data warehousing and analytics company, Teradata. The data produced in oil & gas includes sensor data from pipelines, downhole data, well head data, and seismic survey data.
Effective use of this big data could increase upstream company profitability by as much as 6% per annum, according to Teradata.
“I can never understand how you can spend hundreds of millions on assets or billions on infrastructure and hire the best brains and PhDs and then you get this data and spend hundreds of millions sending a ship up and down, or putting down micro-seismic sensors and the next thing you get the data you have paid millions for and don’t govern or manage it properly, you just store it,” said Teradata’s O’Doherty.
Proper data analytics could help operators to increase safety on fields by predicting events before they happen, such as well blow-outs. Proper data use can also reduce the time taken to analyse an EOR site, for example, reducing costs for the upstream operator.
The key to extracting value from these massive data sets is to bring all the data together, into far fewer data streams, that can be effectively broken down into usable data.
“The oil companies spend all the money getting the data and then don’t do anything with it,” said O’Doherty.
