2010 Digital Energy Workshop
This week I attended the 2010 Digital Energy Workshop here in Houston. It is an event sponsored by the Society of Petroleum Engineers, Gulf Coast Section and a number of vendors to the energy industry. The intent of the workshop is to address the technologies and issues driving the evolution in the use of digital technologies in the E&P industry. As an old manufacturing guy, I have my own preconceived notions about the state of this evolution. In the manufacturing world we had to address the same issues a couple of decades ago. The process manufacturing world lives on slimmer margins. The E&P world has not had to face that reality until recently, and not that much even then.
The focus of this industry has been on optimizing drilling and maximizing recovery from a field (35% is a reasonable number). As such, there is quite a bit of material and work focusing on reservoir modeling, geological tools and the operations of the drilling process, such as directional drilling. But when we talk about what we call digital energy we are talking about the integration of data from downhole sources, operational data and business data in such a way that organizational silos are not constraints to business improvement. Good decisions are made faster than ever before. Since the Houston area is one of the primary centers for this industry this event attracts vendors who see digital energy as a major business opportunity.
Major industry vendors like Halliburton, Baker Hughes, Schlumberger, ABB and Microsoft were major sponsors. Other, smaller firms like OSIsoft, Merrick Systems, Business Fundamentals Group, MicroStrategy and Performix were also sponsors. While this list of vendors is not as large as it will be in the future, it does contain some major corporations with a major commitment to digital energy offerings. Microsoft and Merrick Systems were the only two with booths at the show. I suspect that it won’t be too long until we see SAP, Oracle, Emerson and Honeywell at this event. All of them have a story to tell to the E&P market.
I heard a few comments about OPC-UA vs. WITSML. Both are communications standards but differ in focus. OPC-Unified Architecture is intended to provide just that, a unified architecture for control equipment and instrumentation which allows the equipment from vendors that adopt the standard to work together automatically. This offers the customer lower costs and greater flexibility when they build their control systems. WITSML is somewhat similar but much more focused on the specific needs of the E&P industry. The point of the comparison is whether or not a more generalized standard is better than one focused on one industry. This sounds like a future blog post to me so I won’t pursue it here.
The various presentations we heard varied from high level overviews of what is digital energy and what’s next to specific case studies of individual projects. What struck me was the similarity to events I attended in my manufacturing past. Those past events, like this one, reflected an industry waking up to new possibilities and technologies. The fact that this was only a one day conference is consistent with the new but growing interest in the topic. The presentations from this conference will be posted in a few days and they, in turn, will also become fodder for my blog posts.
Another interesting point that struck me is that the Gulf of Mexico now has a lot of fiber optic cables connecting the platforms. This means that the bandwidth available for platforms to connect to their on-shore operations centers is dramatically greater, allowing many more options than for those which continue to rely on low bandwidth satellite connections. Conversely, many on-shore fields are still limited to cellular or satellite connectivity. The ramifications of this seem to me to be worth yet another future blog post. Integrated operations of a geographically disperse collection of equipment using different connection pipes (bandwidth) using standardized applications is an intriguing concept.
Finally, one last observation was the literature review that the organizers did. Initially that seems like a dry topic (well, actually it was still a dry topic at the end). What stood out to me was the number of case studies that reported notable savings. Each study was a little different but, collectively, the direction was the same. This industry is starting to understand how to make and save money with this technology. As the number of these types of case studies increases, the number of use cases available to software developers and hardware manufacturers increases as well. That implies rapid growth in product features and diversity. It’s all good.
As you can see, there will be more posts from me on these topics in the future. Stay tuned…
