February / March 2015 Issue 53

Faster ways to find the rightvideoAcoustic fibre optics in wellsWhat you can do with seismic inthe cloudIs better subsurface knowledgethe key to improving the financial viability of offshore operations?

Official publication of Finding Petroleum

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Events 2014Non-seismic GeophysicsLondon, 19 Feb 2015

Finding Enough Oil & Gas in NW EuropeLondon, 12 Mar 2015

Transforming Sub-Surface InterpretationAberdeen, 17 Mar 2015

Doing more with Subsurface DataAberdeen, 18 Mar 2015

Transforming Sub-Surface interpretationLondon, 13 Apr 2015

Doing more with Subsurface DataStavanger, 05 May 2015

Doing more with Production DataStavanger, 06 May 2015

Finding Oil in Atlantic BasinsLondon, 27 May 2015

Events 2015

Find out more and reserve your place at

www.d-e-j.comAdmis

sion

from 20

www.findingpetroleum.com

Naturally, first reactions have been Give us a Tax

break! and How do we get Costs way down?

Yes, these are important because they finish up in the

Numerator of the crude economic equation that de-

scribes profitability.

But there is also a Denominator which is, or are, barrels

of oil or cubic feet of gas. How do we input more of

these into the equation?

I have two thoughts:

Beginning with a story. Many years ago I had a minor role in BPs takeover of Britoil

(previously of course BNOC, the UKgovernments national oil and gas company).

This takeover was underpinned by profound understanding of North Sea geology, of Yet-

to-Find volumes, of undeveloped discoveries, of upcoming development projects, of pro-

ducing fields.

In point of fact, BP probably understood Britoils acreage and fields better than Britoil

did itself.

This 1986 1988 work was almost entirely analogue paper composite logs, paper seis-

mic sections, hand-drawn maps, tracing paper, light-tables, occasional use of the digi-

tizing table (remember those?). It worked!

Today it is difficult, impossible actually, to see such a profound underpinning anywhere,

perhaps because lots of key individuals have moved on, perhaps because of lazy as-

sumptions that the North Seas best days are somehow behind it.

And yet the significant Johan Sverdup discovery in the NOCS, in a well-explored area,

was as I understand it, the result of deep geological knowledge and innovative thinking.

We know perfectly well how to do these things see for example this summary of how

work on Nova Scotia revitalised exploration there. www.qz.com/318755

Something similar, of similar scope and imagination, is needed for the North Sea and, ar-

guably, NW Europe as a whole. Somehow this has to be a multi-client study, driven and

delivered by oil and gas industry folk, not some academic or research exercise.

Secondly, we geoscientists have developed a lazy dependence on yet-another-towed-

streamer-3D-seismic-survey which we need to move beyond. There are all sorts of new

technologies out there, from seismic nodes, passive seismic, fibre optics, full tensor

gravimetry, electromagnetics, that can tell us much more about the sub-surface, bringing

better predictions, and higher volume successes.

In principle, digital technology should allow us to be more efficient and effective in inte-

grating diverse sources of existing data and new multi-measurements, thereby allowing

coherent interpretation from the scale of whole basins to individual producing reservoirs.

This deeper knowledge will indeed lead to wider opportunities.

Just one snag..

I havent yet seen a digital offering that can do this!

1February / March 2015 - digital energy journal

Deeper knowledge leadsto wider opportunitiesby David Bamford

Issue 53 February / March 2015

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Front cover art by Alex McKenzie, artist, Digital Energy Journal

If we do not act quickly, the UK Continental Shelf (UKCS) andNorwegian Continental Shelf (NOCS) will soon be on life support.

David Bamford is a director of Digital Energy Journal and Finding Petroleum, and a non-executive director of

Premier Oil

2 digital energy journal - February / March 2015

Leaders

Repsol and IBM - cognitive computing in E+PSpanish oil major Repsol is working together with IBM to build a $15m-$20m system to answer difficult questions about whichlicenses to bid for and how to optimise production, using experts together with big dataBy Santiago Quesada, Repsols director for exploration and production technology

Oil companies continue to make high-stake

decisions in the face of increasing uncer-

tainty and geological risk based on extremely

complex data sets.

Cognitive computing systems can help in ex-

ploration and production by helping individ-

uals to better interpret big data and then

make informed decisions based on that data.

As a result, companies can maximise access

to better exploration areas, increase the pro-

ductivity of maturing oil fields and their

value, enhance safety and mitigate environ-

mental risks.

Until recently, geoscientists have been tasked

with mostly manually reading and extracting

information from enormous amounts of data

including journal papers reports, seismic data

and models of reservoirs, wells and facilities.

Recognising the need for an intelligent solu-

tion, Repsol and IBM, leveraging years of

existing collaboration, recently teamed up to

develop cognitive technologies that can

analyse subsurface data in order to drive im-

provements in exploration and production.

Based at IBM's pioneering Cognitive Envi-

ronments Laboratory (CEL), the researchers

will work on two prototype applications

which are specifically designed to increase

Repsol's strategic decision-making in the op-

timisation of oil reservoir production and in

the acquisition of new exploration areas and

production fields, both onshore and offshore.

Repsol is making an initial investment of $15

million to $20 million to develop two appli-

cations with early results targeted for late

2015.

The team will work together in New York

and Madrid, with each company committing

six to 10 employees to develop the technol-

ogy.

People, devices and spaces

To best achieve this, the cognitive computing

technology infrastructure has been designed

to specifically interact with people across

various devices and physical spaces.

For example, the technology is able to

process questions asked by humans in natural

language and sifts through information to re-

spond with the most likely answers.

This, in turn, will enable individuals and

teams to make better decisions by overcom-

ing cognitive limitations posed by big data.

Scientists in the CEL will also experiment

with a combination of traditional and new in-

terfaces which are based upon gesture, robot-

ics and advanced visualisation and

navigation techniques.

Through these modalities, researchers can

leverage sophisticated models of human

characteristics, preferences and biases that

may be present in the decision-making

process.

The technology will also introduce new real-

time factors which should be considered such

as current news events around economic in-

stability, political unrest and natural disasters.

These tools are not intended to replace the

key stakeholders such as geologists, geo-

physicists, engineers, investment managers,

risk analysts and corporate strategists, but to

assist them with building more fluid concep-

tual and geological models, highlighting the

impact of the potential risks and uncertainty,

visualising trade-offs and exploring what-if

scenarios.

The new applications developed by Repsol

and IBM will improve the way oil companies

visualise and develop exploration and pro-

duction activities.

It is envisioned that companies from other

sectors will set up their own CELs to make

better informed decisions and, ultimately, in-

crease their companies bottom lines.

Santiago Quesada, Repsols director for explorationand production technology

Oceaneerings Video Vault - faster video retrievalOceaneering has developed the Video Vault cloud-based solution to make it easier to store, share and find the right piece ofsubsea and offshore videoSubsea engineering company Oceaneering

has launched a cloud-based live video

streaming and archiving solution called

Video Vault to make it easier to store, re-

trieve, view, share and analyze the video you

are looking for.

To simplify future video retrieval and analy-

sis, video files can be tagged geographically,

with comments or subtitles, or according to

the time it was recorded. This means you can

develop systems to quickly pull up

video relating to a certain location or

operational significance, and view

both real time and historical data.

The use of video in offshore opera-

tions, for both subsea and surface

monitoring, has grown massively in

recent years, and brought a lot of

challenges for finding the right video

image from hours of video files, says

Mark Stevens, Director of Communications-

GDS, Oceaneering.

Usually Oceaneering has about 100 simulta-

neous video feeds across the company.

The data files are getting larger all the time,

with more high definition and 3D cameras

and high-resolution video compression for-

mats.

Meanwhile there are many limitations to

physical media (such as DVDs, USB

drives). It is hard to manage and share files.

Common Operating Picture (COP)

Oceaneerings core aim is to help oil and gas

personnel create a Common Operating Pic-

ture. This is a term which originated in the

military, which means a view of all of your

operations on a (usually large screen) map,

where you can drill in to see what you need.

The Common Operating Picture serves as a

dashboard of all of your activity, showing

the locations of all your vessels and rigs.

When video is added to the COP, users can

click on any of numerous monitored assets

to see associated recorded video.

You can view a thumbnail of all your real

time video streams, displayed in the appro-

priate position of the map, refreshed every

30 seconds.

You can say show me all the video in the

Gulf of Mexico, then click on an individual

ROV in that area and say follow.

Some oil companies (including Statoil) have

their own 3D visualisation platform, and can

view this data in the COP, as well.

Benefits of video

Oil and gas companies are using video in

many different ways.

Subsea, companies use video for monitoring

ROV operations, observing rotary brush

cleaning operations, subsea X-ray imaging

(digital radiography) and general long term

asset monitoring.

The video is proving particularly useful in

subsea cleaning work. You can capture

videos before and after cleaning, to see how

effective the cleaning was, and then work

out a better cleaning schedule.

If the video is of a pipeline inspection, all of

the video can be geographically tagged, so

you can automatically bring up the video in-

spection image of a certain section of

pipeline.

A lot of companies are asking for video of

drilling data, particularly looking at the drill

floor, to record the drill pipe going through

the floor of the drill ship and back out again.

Viewing the data

In terms of viewing the data, about 30 per

cent of clients use mobile devices. That

continues to be the trend, Mr Stevens said.

It means staff can monitor offshore activities

from wherever they are, so less staff are re-

quired to be actually offshore.

To search for video on Video Vault, you start

with a Google Earth or ESRI map interface.

You can see all the live video streams with a

location on the map, or you can draw a box

around an area and see all the video you

have for that region. You can browse the en-

tire video library with advanced search, pre-

view and indexing, using thumbnails to

speed identification of interest areas, and

then play back selected video with the con-

venience of fast- and slow-forward, fast- and

slow-rewind, and pause capabilities.

Clients often ask to connect different files to

the video at appropriate points (such as pdf

documents and pictures), which you can do

with metadata content management.

You can provide usage data such as which

employees were watching the video and how

much bandwidth they consumed, as well as

total bandwidth utilization across the organi-

zation.

There are tools to deliver a short video file

to your desktop so if you want to watch a 5

minute section of a 4 hour video, you dont

need to download the whole thing.

Archival infrastructure

The Video Vault solution is made available

as a hosted cloud service for a tiered, daily-

rate or monthly price depending on applica-

tion, including maintenance. It is also

available as a bundled hardware solution for

on premise installation. This means you can

store the data on your local servers, or you

can host it on a standard commercial

archival service like Google. Clients never

have to see any physical storage media.

If you are concerned about storing your data

on standard commercial cloud services, you

could use Video Vault with Amazons Gov-

Cloud service, designed specifically for

more sensitive data.

Open standards / commercial systems are

used as much as possible (including integra-

tion with Google Earth and ESRI) to give

clients as much flexibility as possible. There

are application programming interfaces

(APIs) enabling you to connect Video Vault

with other software tools.

There are 10 software developers working

on the project, out of a total team of 55 de-

velopers at Oceaneering.

Geospatial Data Integration

Video Vaults ability to integrate geospatial

data means that the GPS co-ordinate of the

asset being monitored is automatically em-

bedded into the captured live video data

stream. For subsea monitoring, the GPS co-

ordinates of the topside vessel is used.

For some subsea projects, transponders have

been laid on the vessel floor, which enable

the gathering of location information from

the seabed.

Larger ROVs have an internal inertial map

(NAV) system, which estimate the ROVs

location based on how it is moving through

the water. It can calculate to within inches

where the ROV is, Stevens says.

In June 2014, Oceaneering acquired a com-

pany called PortVision, which has a vessel

tracking service and 5 year database of ves-

sel locations around the world derived from

automatic identification systems (AIS)data.

Oceaneering is now connecting the vessel

information with the video if you know

about the date and which asset the camera

was recording, you can put this together

with AIS data to work out the location.

3February / March 2015 - digital energy journal

Subsurface

Have a Common Operating Picture of your operations- drill down to get further information and live video

Interesting recent developments in land seismic recording technology include mini-vibes, low frequency seismic, and UAVsfor wireless seismic quality control, says Andy Bull, VP Product Development, Emerging Technologies at INOVA Geophysical.But we may be reaching the limit of the number of seismic channels we are able to record without significant advances incomputing technology.

Inova - mini-vibes, low fequency and UAVs

4 digital energy journal - February / March 2015

Subsurface

INOVA has developed a range of small Vi-

broseis trucks, known as mini-vibes, which

can create seismic energy in areas where

standard Vibroseis trucks cant go.

The usual way to create seismic energy on

land is by using large Vibroseis trucks which

provide 60-80,000 lbs of force.

Inova produces the UNIVIB and UNIVIB 2

Vibrator trucks, which provide up to 26,000

(UNIVIB) or 34,000 (UNIVIB 2) pounds of

peak force, but have the advantage of being

much easier to use in urban areas, or areas

with more difficult terrain, said Andy Bull,

VP Product Development, Emerging Tech-

nologies at INOVA Geophysical.

He was speaking at the Finding Petroleum

conference in London on November 26,

New E&P Technologies.

These little (mini vibe) machines are capa-

ble of really nice manoeuvring, low environ-

mental impact and tremendous broadband

energy, he said.

These machines can output super signals

over a bandwidth of 1-400 Hz and at signifi-

cant depth, he said.

In one example, data acquired in the South

Georgia Rift Basin

(USA), using 2 UNIVIB-

trucks, with data at 6 to

76 Hz. They have been

able to bring out a struc-

ture at 10,000 feet, he

said.

The market for mini-vibes

is partly driven by the in-

creased efforts oil compa-

nies have to make about

to limit the environmental

impact of exploration, he

said.

This includes thinking

about how much line cut-

ting (path clearing) they

need to do, how much dy-

namite they are going to

use, and what to do about

wildlife.

The environmental impact is further reduced

if you use cable-less technology and small vi-

broseis trucks, he said.

Because they have a shorter length and

width, less line cutting is required, he said.

They can also move up slopes of difficult ter-

rain.

INOVA Geophysical is a manufacturer of

land seismic technology, formed from assets

from ION Geophysical and BGP in March

2010. It produces a range of seismic record-

ing equipment and seismic source equipment.

Low frequency seismic

INOVA is seeing an increasing customer in-

terest in working with low frequency seismic.

We have been involved in several projects in

various locations where we starting with fre-

quencies as low as 1.5 Hz, and we think we

can go down further, he said.

MEMS (Microelectromechanical systems)

sensors are ideal for [recording] this low fre-

quency data, he said. The sensor systems are

designed to be small (107g), low power

(85mW) and tightly integrated with acquisi-

tion systems.

We're still learning a lot about the benefits

of these low frequencies.

Mr Bull showed an example of data surveyed

by Petroleum Development Oman (OMAN),

where during the survey, the company de-

cided to extend the bandwidth down to 1.5Data acquired in the South Georgia Rift Basin (USA) using 2 UNIVIB trucks was able to bring out a structure at 10,000 feet

Mini vibroseis machines - "capable of really nice manoeuvring, low environmentalimpact and tremendous broadband energy"

Hz, and you can see how the data improves.

You can see just the data generated from 1.5

6 Hz seismic and it is very clear.

The company has also done some downhole

testing with sensors recording at up to 7,500

feet, recording data as low as 0.5 Hz.

Downhole data was also recorded at high fre-

quencies, resulting in coherent 200 Hz en-

ergy visible at over 5,000 ft depth.

Seismic technology market

At the time of his talk in November 2014,

Inova was already seeing oil and gas compa-

nies make reductions in their exploration pro-

grams due to cost constraints due to the low

oil price, he said.

But the Middle East is still a healthy area.

There's a lot of investment still going on, a

lot of surveys planned, he said.

Annual spending on seismic technology has

been fairly flat for the past 10-15 years, with

a small uplift in the mid-2000s with a move

to larger surveys.

This creates difficulty for companies like

ourselves, he said. We're helping the mar-

ket acquire much more data, of better quality,

but the volume of spend is not increasing.

Many companies are starting to look seri-

ously at broadband seismic acquisition, as

they look for oil at greater depths, in more

complex geology, and with better resolution

images, he said. Or they want to do full

waveform inversion, using the two-way

wave equation to produce high resolution ve-

locity models.

Cabled and wireless

In terms of land seismic acquisition systems,

80 to 85 per cent of new seismic system sales

are still cabled, rather than cable-less.

The costs [of cabled systems] are reducing,

he said. The cable system is still substan-

tially less per channel than cable-less sys-

tem.

Cabled systems like INOVAs G3i HD need

to be able to run surveys at all kind of scales,

be integrated with other types of sensor (for

example with waterborne sensors for transi-

tion zone surveys), or used with cable-less,

and productivity is very important.

Keeping productivity high is a huge focus

for us, he said.

Meanwhile there is growing interest in cable-

less technology for environmental and safety

reasons, he said. It requires smaller crews.

The power consumption is reducing all the

time, so now devices are capable of 20-30

days operation in the field from one battery

charge.

With a cable-less system like INOVAs

Hawk, you can do powerful quality control

and noise monitoring simply, via wi-fi, he

said.

UAVs

Companies are now showing interest in de-

veloping unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)

which can fly around the spread of wireless

devices, download data over wi-fi and do

basic quality control on it, he said.

Purchasing a fixed wing UAV, which can

carry a 5 lb payload and fly for 2 hours, costs

about $150,000, he said.

But they might be able to quality control 9-

10 lines in a 2 hour period, compared to 1-2

lines using conventional methods.

By integrating UAVs with cable-less sys-

tems, powerful status QC and noise monitor-

ing can be achieved simply and even more

efficiently without the need for complex

radio infrastructure, he said.

But there are still regulatory obstacles to

using UAVs in many countries though,

he said.

Big data

There is a lot of talk about increasing the

number of channels (individually recorded

data streams) in a seismic survey, but people

have perhaps not taken into consideration

how they will communicate and store all the

data, he said.

With 250,000 channels, your data rate is 4 to

5 gigabits per second.

That's a tremendous amount of data coming

up the cable. The system has got to handle

this.

Typical tape drives can record 160 to 250

megabytes a second, and a solid state disk

can store 500 to 600 megabytes a second.

Disks in a RAID array could store 3 to 4

gigabytes per second.

But your data recording speed can be re-

duced by many factors including the proces-

sor, input-output, memory, cache, quality

control. You see that throughput onto your

recording device really comes down, he

said.

Were right on the edge of what's capable

and what's supportable in the field, he said.

Its a very big challenge - taking this acqui-

sition up to 500,000 and beyond that.

In terms of data storage, 500,000 channels

could generate up to 86 terabytes of data over

24 hours. Over 6 months, thats 12 petabytes

of data storage (one petabyte = 1000 ter-

abytes). A petabyte costs about $250,000

today. Its a massive cost, he said. We're

going to be really challenged to solve this.

Maybe we'll see a bit of plateau of what

people need in terms of channel count until

they understand how to handle this volume

of data.

5February / March 2015 - digital energy journal

Subsurface

View Andy Bulls talk on video and down-load slides at www.findingpetroleum.com/video/1095.aspx

Inova's G3i HD cabled seismic recording system - designed for high productivity

The best way to get the most value from seis-

mic data is to have a strategy for managing

the data at the beginning of the project, said

Jane Hodson, head of technical services at

DataCo, and formerly lead subsurface tech-

nologist with Centrica, speaking at the Digi-

tal Energy Journal Aberdeen conference on

November 27, Better ways to Manage Seis-

mic Data.

That will give a more value upfront than

managing it at the end.

Good data management is a key to opening

up that potential and we have excellent sup-

ply of subsurface data management expertise

in Aberdeen, Ms Hodson said. With this we

can be a global player in this field, we have

the domain knowledge, we have the people

and we have the technology.

As well as reducing the amount of budget

companies have available, the low oil price is

also likely to drive company towards acquisi-

tions, mergers and sales and even decommis-

sioning, she said, which all leads to big

demands on data.

With this current downturn in the market we

have to start looking at ways to work differ-

ently, work smarter, faster and work with the

data we already have, she said.

Seismic data at the right time

Having well managed seismic data starts

with how the data is delivered into your sys-

tem in the first place, she said.

A key question is who in the company first

receives the data.

Does new seismic data get delivered to your

data management team, to the IM team, or

does it go straight to the geophysicists? she

asked. Does it get catalogued?

Is the seismic data delivered with every-

thing attached, such as an acquisition report,

or a loading sheet? If it doesnt have a load-

ing sheet, how do you know what all the

data is?

Do you have the naming standards in place

so you can identify the type of seismic you

have?

Who quality controls the seismic

when it is uploaded? Is it the geo-

physicist? Is it the data manger?

How do you know that they have

loaded it correctly or have QC it?

Its imperative this is done, be-

cause if it is not then this hap-

pens.

I've had people coming to me and

saying, 'I cant see my seismic',

that they've loaded. I said, Youve

loaded it in Norway, but it's in the UK sector,

because you got the wrong UTM. So the

rule is get it loaded by someone who actually

knows how to do this not everyone has that

skill.

If you get the data catalogued, loaded, veri-

fied and ready to interpret then you have

done your job right.

Dry wells or worse

If you don't get the process right things start

to happen you wish had not.

The geophysicist does his/her interpretation,

creates all those lovely horizons and sur-

faces, and gives it to the geologist.

The geologist creates the geological model,

gives it to the reservoir engineer, and they all

decide where to drill the well. They drill the

well and then, oh, there's nothing there.

Back to the drawing board because you did

not ensure the data was loaded correctly in

the first place. Lost time, lost money and lost

opportunity.

Data verification and data integrity are key

things to be completed before any interpreta-

tion work is carried out then hopefully you

will have less failures.

Publishing and Archiving

Whether or not you find oil, the seismic in-

terpretation data needs to be captured and

published.

And when all this is done, and the entire

package is been tied up quite neatly, the last

bit is to archive or sell! Whether it is archiv-

ing in your own internal storage system or an

external one you need to make that decision.

Companies spends millions acquiring seis-

mic, and then they forget to do the critical

publishing of the final piece of work.

In the end it is essential you have a detailed

catalogue of your data, whether that is seis-

mic or well, or even documents.

Have your archive strategy in place, be-

cause you never know when you might need

to access it again.

As a final statement it means in the future

you can check your archives instead of

spending another five million pounds or

more on reshooting or purchasing seismic,

when you may have it already.

IT

So the geophysicist is on the workstation,

and wants to access the data, but [the net-

work is] so slow its driving them crazy.

You can do as much as you want to clean up

those data, but if the [network] you have got

is not up to the job, then whats the point?

Work with IT. Make sure that you have

everything in place like network connectiv-

ity. So when the geophysicists are actually

interpreting the data, they don't have to wait

10 minutes for each inline to display.

Geophysicists are a valuable commodity in

themselves so wouldnt you prefer they had

the tools to deliver the projects on time then

sit around waiting.

6 digital energy journal - February / March 2015

Subsurface

You can view Janes talk on video at www.d-e-j.com/video/1228.aspx

Getting more value from seismicIn the current financial environment, oil companies need to improve the way they get maximum value from their seismic. JaneHodson explained how to do this

Delegates at Digital Energy Journal's Nov 27 Aberdeen conference"Better ways to manage seismic data"

Using digital cables on the seabed, to record

seismic data and get a picture of how the oil-

field is changing as it is produced, is gener-

ally thought to enable an increase in oil and

gas recovery of 5 per cent over the lifetime

of the field, said Helge Brandsaeter, presi-

dent of OCTIO, speaking at the Digital En-

ergy Journal Stavanger conference on

December 10, People and Subsea Data.

But from an investment point of view, sys-

tems are not being installed because too

often it is seen as nice to have rather than a

necessity, he said.

Most oil and gas staff are busy meeting their

short term objectives, and dont have time

for longer term ones.

But the short term business case can be

much stronger if you see it as a way to mon-

itor the overburden (rock between the reser-

voir and seabed) and avoid costly

environmental fines, he said.

Octio is majority owned by Statoil Technol-

ogy Invest.

Overburden problems

The seismic recording can help spot prob-

lems leading to possible overburden leakage.

There have been a number

of well publicised cases in

Norway where a water in-

jection well put more pres-

sure into the rock than it

was able to handle, leading

to craters opening up in the

subsea, he said.

Fields in the Barents Sea

have shallow reservoirs, so

there is higher risk

You see faulting going

from the reservoir to sur-

face directly, he said. In

reservoirs like this, The

overburden is as important

as the reservoir."

In Brazil, the overburden

is young in geological terms which means

that if water is injected at too high pressure

you can open pre-existing faults to the

seabed, and water and oil seeping to the

seabed.

By monitoring the seabed with digital ca-

bles, you can see how the rock is fracturing

and if there is a chance the fracture will

reach the surface. Its not difficult to see

that seismic can map any such seepage, he

said.

You can see how the cracks develop subsur-

face. This will give the operational teams a

notice that something has to be done by the

injection, he said.

It is reasonably easy to set up a business

proposition which is reasonably sound, he

said.

Drill cuttings

The system is being used on the Oseberg

field (140km Northwest of Bergen), to mon-

itor the injection of drill cuttings and waste

water.

Drill cuttings are milled very finely at the

platform and injected into the reservoir.

This provides a much less expensive option

for managing drill cuttings than transport

back to land.

The average cost for a North Sea field for

transportation of cuttings and water waste is

close to $20m a year, he said. The alterna-

tive is to ensure safe injection, for $2m to

3m.

But Norway has zero tolerance for any

waste pollution. If you can't ensure safe in-

jection you have to transfer all the fluids on-

shore, he said.

Seabed infrastructure

Octio typically installs a mesh of seismic

sensors on the seabed, 50m apart, which

communicate with a hub and send the data

to surface.

One system has 172 sensors in a W shape

around the well on the seabed.

The sensors have 4 components, 3 compo-

nent accelerometers and hydrophones.

The sensors have an active mode for

recording seismic data in a survey, and a

passive mode for continually listening to

seismic data.

Everything is managed remotely, with data

7February / March 2015 - digital energy journal

Subsurface

OCTIO - business case for permanent reservoirseismicIt may be easier to justify spending on permanent reservoir seismic if it is used for overburden monitoring, or monitoring drillcuttings injection, rather than to monitor the reservoir, says Helge Brandsaeter of Octio

Octio produces a system with permanent digital cables on the seabed, whichcan make regular seismic surveys and monitor how the reservoir is changing.

Developing a better business case for permanent reser-voir seismic monitoring: Helge Brandsaeter, president,OCTIO

8 digital energy journal - February / March 2015

Subsurface

Using fibre optics to record seismic data in

wells has been done since 2010, but there

has been enormous progress made since

then, both with the technology and market

acceptance, said David Hill, chief technol-

ogy officer of UK company OptaSense,

speaking at the Finding Petroleum London

conference on Nov 26, New E&P Tech-

nologies.

Seismic recording with optical fibre using a

technique called Distributed Acoustic Sens-

ing (DAS) in wells is not as sensitive as con-

ventional geophones, but the target is to

reach that level, he said.

Some people say the oil and gas industry

takes 30 years to adopt a new technology,

but the technology has already been widely

implemented in 5 years, he said.

You dont need to drill a special observation

well, you just install a fibre-optic cable in an

existing producer or injector well. If there is

already a fibre-optic cable in the well (per-

haps installed to monitor temperature), you

can use that.

The DAS technology has been used on one

offshore well so far, operated by Shell in the

Gulf of Mexico. Shell was conducting a

large seismic survey in the region and

wanted to see if it could get any value from a

fibre-optic cable which had been installed in

one of the wells a few years ago for a differ-

ent purpose, he said.

We were asked to attach our box to it, to

see if we could get any usable seismic.

The recorded data was so good, that one of

our employees had to spend seven weeks on

that platform, including over Christmas,

recording 50,000 shots.

1400 channels were recorded simultane-

ously, from two 6km fibres.

In another project, in a mature field in

Oman, the customer wanted to monitor

where injected steam was going, so they

could plan an infill well strategy. To do this

fibre was installed in eight wells, a task

which took about a month, and then a 3D

DAS-VSP (Vertical Seismic Profile) was ac-

quired simultaneously on each well

The data was correlated and stacked as it

was being recorded, enabling quality control

do be done immediately.

After seismic shooting, the data is being

stitched together to get a field wide view, he

said.

The same system can be used for time lapse

seismic, comparing a seismic survey today

with the seismic survey at some time in the

past.

For this to work, the fibre probably needs to

be fixed firmly in the well (cemented or at-

tached to the casing or production string),

not dangled on a wireline.

The technology could also be used to moni-

tor CO2 storage wells, he said.

The repeatability of the recorded data helps

people gain confidence in it, he said.

The fibre can also be used for microseismic,

recording natural seismic energy, which can

also be used to understand the subsurface.

Recording passive seismic data in an oil well

is not a new idea. It is conventionally done,

by drilling an observation well and inserting

geophones in it, or installing the geophone in

an existing well. The work is risky and ex-

pensive, he said.

In one example, fibre was installed on a

highly deviated well, which meant that by

triangulation you could work out where the

source was.

Optasense currently has 180 employees and

offices around the UK, Houston, Calgary,

Dubai and Australia. It recently acquired two

California based companies; RIO (Redfern

Integrated Optics), which produces the spe-

cial laser which sends the light through the

fibre, and SR2020, a specialist in high defi-

nition borehole seismic imaging and inter-

pretation.

How it works

The technology works by firing a pulse of

light (laser) into the fibre.

The glass fibre is the purest material man

has ever made, but there is enough inhomo-

geneity in the molecular structure to cause a

small amount of light backscatter, he said.

The backscatter appears to be random, but it

stays relatively constant if the fibre is not

disturbed.

Using acoustic fibre optics in wellsUK company Optasense reports that enormous progress is being made with using fibre optics in wells for recording seismicdata, monitoring, fracking and flow, among other applications.

transmitted back to shore.

The installation of the system basically

comes down to the cost of leasing vessels,

and installation cost is a third of the lifetime

operating costs.

The data communications infrastructure can

also be used for any other subsea equipment.

If you build such an area wide infrastruc-

ture we can use it for all types of communi-

cations and types of sensors, he says. You

can drop down a sensor and communicate to

surface.

We have made basically an ethernet on the

seafloor, you can interface any system to

us, he said.

Octio is working with a number of standardi-

sation committees including SWIG (Subsea

Wireless Group) and SIIS (Subsea Instru-

mentation Interface Standardisation).

Watch Helges talk on video at www.d-e-j.com/video/1502.aspx

Making progresswith recordingseismic in wellswith fibre optic David Hill, chieftechnology officer,Optasense

9February / March 2015 - digital energy journal

Subsurface

CGG - time for seismic on the cloud?For economic reasons if nothing else, the oil and gas industry is likely to start moving its seismic data to the cloud, saysCGGs Henri Blondelle

But if there is a tiny strain on the fibre,

which can include a strain caused by a noise,

the backscatter pattern changes slightly.

With a calculation involving the speed of

light, you can calculate which part of the

fibre that event happened.

The processing work will typically divide a

length of fibre into a number of sections and

work out the sounds which could be heard at

each section of the cable (so it is equivalent

to one seismic channel). For example a 5km

fibre can be split into 500 x 10m sections.

The fibre can be installed by attaching it to

the production string, or cemented behind

the casing. It can also be run into the well on

a wireline or slickline. It has been used on a

well 7km long.

The fibre-optic cables are very robust.

Fibre is actually stronger than steel, he

said. These cables have been developed

over 20 years.

The fibre-optic cable can handle tempera-

tures of up to 300 degrees C.

The fibre response is quite directional, and

not so sensitive cross axis so it cannot de-

termine which direction a sound is coming

from. One possible solution is to wind the

fibre around the well, he said, or try to de-

velop a perpendicularly sensitive cable.

Fracking and flow

The DAS acoustic data can be used to moni-

tor what is happening in the well, including

fracking operations, monitoring flow, water

loading and valve operations.

For example you can see a rising water level

in the wells. You can also record the flow

rate of oil and see the trends.

Sometimes wells gradually fill with water,

and then the oil suddenly pushes past it,

sending the water back into the reservoir.

You can monitor what is happening across

inflow control valves (ICVs) and at the gas

lift values (GLVs) in order to make sure they

are working properly.

You can also monitor pressure. In the future

we hope this technology will replace gauges

downhole, he said.

The technology has been used to monitor

electrical submersible pumps (ESPs),

analysing the noise to see rotational speeds,

and spot for any cavitation effects in the

motor.

In fracking, you can check the perforation

charges are firing properly, and then monitor

the flow through the perforations. You can

also listen to what is happening with a frac

job on a neighbouring well.

Sometimes frackers push proppant into an

adjacent well, potentially blocking it, he

said.

It has been used to make sure plugs are set

properly, because of a particular sound sig-

nature which is heard when a plug is set.

Sometimes, the system detects wells having

sudden leaks, releasing fluid at high pressure

and then closing. This is something a stan-

dard sensor would probably not capture, he

said.

The system cant get do multiphase flow

measurements but there are strong indica-

tions it might be possible, he said.

The technology has nowhere near fulfilled

its full capabiilty yet.

Data

The company is trying to come up with a

standard way to define the data, so the data

can be transferred between systems.

The data files can be enormous, with one

well generating a terabyte a day without

any problem, he says. That's only going to

get orders of magnitude worse as technology

progresses.

To keep data files manageable, it is essential

to process the data at source, so you are only

transferring the much smaller processed data

files, he said.

In 2015, version 4 of the OptaSense DAS

system will be made available, with an extra

6dB signal to noise improvement and better

spatial resolution, he said.

Other applications

Optasenses biggest business application for

the technology so far is for pipeline monitor-

ing. It is currently installed on 12,000 km of

pipeline, to detect potentially damaging ac-

tivity along the pipeline and detect leaks.

The technology is also used to monitor and

installed around factories to monitor for peo-

ple climbing over or cutting fences.

It is being used for condition monitoring, to

monitor condition of risers.

View a video of Davids talk at www.find-ingpetroleum.com/video/1060.aspx

Many companies in the retail and banking

sector moved their data to the cloud in the pe-

riod 2008-2009, driven by the need to reduce

costs after the 2008 crisis, said Henri

Blondelle, VP Global Business Development

CGG Data Management Services.

Perhaps now oil companies will move seismic

data to the cloud for the same reason.

He was speaking at the Digital Energy Jour-

nal conference in Aberdeen on November 27,

Better Ways to Manage Seismic Data.

The benefits of cloud data are well publicised,

but perhaps none of them motivate activity as

much as short term economic gain.

The financial case of storing data on cloud

servers, rather than on your own, is

quite strong.

If you want to store data in-house, your in-

vestment in buying storage equipment is ini-

tially quite high, followed by a small

additional cost each year for new data stor-

age. So your purchasing costs are uneven.

You might choose to buy new equipment

again after 3-5 years.

Using a cloud or provider you can keep the

cost the same every year, and the cost will

also decrease as the cost of storage equipment

decreases. You only pay for the storage you

need, and can increase or decrease it on de-

mand.

I have seen a lot of pilots, a lot of proof of

concepts, which for me prove that the indus-

try will be ready in the next few months to

absorb this challenge [of putting seismic on

the cloud], he said.

Once the data has been moved onto the cloud,

the industry can gain many further benefits,

already used by other industries, such as the

ability to run Hadoop based interpretation on

it, he said.

CGG works together with Microsoft Azure as

a cloud service provider, and proposes its cus-

tomers a package with CGG Data Manage-

ment services running over Microsoft Azure.

Security and control

Many oil and gas companies have chosen not

to move data to the cloud due to security con-

cerns, an argument made stronger by many

recent cloud hacking stories.

To try to mitigate these concerns, cloud serv-

ice provider Microsoft Azure recently con-

ducted a survey of its existing customers to

ask them what they thought about security

after having moved their data to the cloud.

All of them considered that the security,

after moving to the cloud, is better than be-

fore, Mr Blondelle said.

A majority (but not all) users consider that

they have more control on the data on the

cloud than with their previous (internally

hosted) solution, he said.

There are many ways cloud service providers

can improve security, such as storing data en-

crypted, ensure the security of the data centre,

and find ways to transfer the data securely, he

said.

Some companies might have legal require-

ments to store data in a certain country, or

might choose not to put some data on the

cloud because of slow internet connections.

Some of these problems can be resolved by

having a partial cloud solution, he said.

Of course the cloud system can make it much

easier to provide other parties with access to

your data as required, including governments

and joint venture partners.

Easier to work with

One often overlooked advantage of putting

seismic data in the cloud is that it is easier to

work with in many ways, he said.

For example, you can create automatic tools

to monitor the quality of your data, and run

business rules. One oil company has 6,000

business rules.

You can display data from many different

servers together, for example if you have sep-

arate databases for well logs and seismic data

files.

You can keep track of all the data processing

tasks which have been done, which is very

helpful if you have to discover an error some-

where in the process you want to roll back,

and have had several interpreters working on

data simultaneously.

You can use sophisticated cloud based analyt-

ics tools which can interpret text.

You can use analytics tools such as Tibcos

Spotfire or Tableau Software. These tools

make it easy to share the results of the analyt-

ics unlike if you do the analytics running

over Petrel, which means that someone needs

to login to a Petrel workstation to view them.

Many interpreters prefer to use something

that looks like Excel - like Spotfire or

Tableau, he says.

Teradata and Horton Works provide a range

of statistical tools you can use.

You can store your seismic data in a Hadoop

based storage solution, which gives you the

ability to do some Hadoop analytics without

downloading the data, including all the seis-

mic processing and interpretation.

In one example, Statoil used Hadoop cloud

storage to make correlations between changes

in seismic data and pore pressure calcula-

tions.

Well logs and drilling data

CGG ran a pilot project in mid-2014 together

with Teradata mixing well logs and drilling

data covering the whole of the North Sea.

It worked with a very difficult drilling data

set, mainly pdfs of well reports, with mud

density data on them. Its very difficult to

extract this information from a pdf, he said.

The project team also tried to automatically

extract data from well logs and well comple-

tion reports.

After extracting the data, efforts were made to

try to find correlations.

Some of the correlations were as expected.

The drillers know already the formations

which are difficult to drill, he said.

But there was also some detailed information

which could be very useful. In this part of

the North Sea, for this particular formation, if

you use this particular mud density, you have

80 per cent of chance to have a bad hole sec-

tion, he said.

There is a possibility of bringing this quanti-

tative information to the people who have to

make a drilling program.

Indexing

CGG has also looked at ways to make seis-

mic data easier to catalogue and index auto-

matically.

Indexing data the classical way generally

involves opening it, reading it, and entering

the relevant information in a database, which

can be time consuming, if you have millions

of files to index. As a result the task is often

not done.

So perhaps if the documents could be

analysed and indexed automatically, oil com-

panies would index documents which other-

wise would not be indexed at all.

These tools are already used by US law firms

to automatically classify reports on

cases, he said.

Subsurface

10 digital energy journal - February / March 2015

View Henris talk on video at www.d-e-j.com/video/1223.aspx

One seismic data hasbeen moved to thecloud, you can gainmany extra benefits,such as being able todo Hadoop processingand automatic data in-dexing - HenriBlondelle, global busi-ness developmentmanager, CGG DataManagement Services

The classic internet search engine, digital li-

brary and enterprise search have traditionally

focused on precision and ranking.

The rationale is that as long as the specific

web page or document you were seeking is

on that first page, it does not matter how

many results are returned.

This approach has been incredibly successful,

leading to Internet search engines like Google

attracting a crowd nearing one billion users a

week, of which 94 per cent never click past

the first page of search results.

But increasingly with Internet search, smart

algorithms recommend or suggest related in-

formation, trying to predict what we need or

may find interesting.

In addition, social networks undoubtedly aid

discovery. However, some researchers feel

the overuse of historical usage and activity

data within algorithms to make suggestions

may place us in a filter bubble constraining

some potential serendipitous encounters.

Enterprise search

In an enterprise environment, significant frus-

tration still exists where the success seen on

the Internet seems harder to replicate inside

an enterprise.

Factors for unsatisfactory retrieval include in-

vestment levels, organizational culture, the

nature of workplace tasks, information gover-

nance and interventions, small crowds, infor-

mation structure and permissions along with

information behaviours of staff and manage-

ment.

Exploratory search

Exploratory search is where the question is

not fully formed in the mind of the searcher.

This is different to known item (or lookup)

search.

It is possible the actual need may in part be

stimulated by the search engine itself, with

the search engine acting like a creative mem-

ber of the team making suggestions from ini-

tial inputs.

Faceted search

Faceted search shows a breakdown of what

exists in the search results by various cate-

gories with counts, normally shown on the

left hand side of the screen inviting further

human interaction to browse and filter results.

These may be potentially useful options when

you consider most enterprise searchers enter

two words or less, searching increasingly

larger haystacks of information, so most

searches deliver hundreds or thousands of re-

sults.

But, it is difficult to represent the richness of

a 50 page report with 6 topics. Furthermore,

the same information item will always be rep-

resented by those same 6 topics, regardless of

what search terms are used and where rele-

vant matches are found inside the document.

One method to provide contextual based

topic filters is word co-occurrence - using

words that appear in proximity to the search

terms found in documents.

Need to be surprising

Recent research by Robert Gordon University

published in the Journal of Information Sci-

ence identified certain information needs with

respect to faceted search refiners.

Research was conducted using word co-oc-

currence stimuli generated from data pro-

vided by the Society of Petroleum Engineers,

Geological Society of London and the Ameri-

can Geological institute. The stimuli was

used to gather survey data from 54 petroleum

engineers from over thirty oil and gas indus-

try organizations.

A need was identified for the surprising as a

search filter.

The research found the most statistically fre-

quent associations (to search terms) were

often too vague and no promise of telling

me anything I didnt already know, rele-

vant but not interesting and contained few

surprises.

However, algorithms such as mutual informa-

tion measure appeared to generate more in-

triguing associations useful for deep dives,

might learn something and high on inter-

estingness quotient, you cant say where

these results may lead you.

Algorithms for surprising

Further research presented at the International

Conference on Knowledge Management used

discriminatory word co-occurrence tech-

niques surfacing potentially surprising asso-

ciations to search terms.

Initial results were promising. In an observa-

tional study of 53 geoscientists in two oil and

gas organizations, 41 per cent felt current

search interfaces used by their organization

facilitated serendipity to a moderate/large ex-

tent, increasing to 73% with the introduction

of certain algorithmically generated filters.

As put by one participant Its like open up

the box for me and Ill pick what does not fit

with my brain, like one of those games.

Surprising and serendipitous encounters oc-

curred giving rise to learning experiences, It

is clear I underestimated the importance of

carbonates in this is immediately important

for the research I am undertaking now.

Surprising associations can be unusual words

or quite common words but appearing in an

unusual or discriminatory context.

For example, What is interesting is that

Halite is there for the Permian, but techni-

cally it could occur for Tertiary, Jurassic,

(others), what is surprising is that it has not.

11February / March 2015 - digital energy journal

Subsurface

Using surprise in subsurface knowledge researchUntil now, enterprise search systems have focused on precision helping you find exactly what you want. But our internetsearch engines are moving more and more towards other ways of guessing what you might want. And surprising you withwhat they find. Should enterprise search move in the same way? By Paul Cleverley and Simon Burnett, Robert GordonUniversity, UK

Subsurface searchneeds to guess whatpeople might be look-ing for - and surprisethem with somethingelse - Paul Cleverley,researcher at RobertGordon University

12 digital energy journal - February / March 2015

Subsurface

Hadoop is a new data storage technology

which may lead to a big change in how the oil

and gas industry manages big data.

High-volume data, whether structured or un-

structured, can be placed into an enterprise

data hub (EDH) on Hadoop and prepared for

further analysis without the time-intensive

steps associated with the traditional relational

database model.

With a Hadoop cluster, both structured and

unstructured data can be managed for use

over long time horizons, in original fidelity,

and integrated with existing infrastructure and

tools.

With Hadoop, organizations have a new way

to think about data, transforming it from a

cost to an asset.

Geophysicists are already evaluating Hadoop

as a technology to support processing seismic

data from a multidimensional perspective,

complementing the traditional processing se-

quence.

New technologies that reduce the latency of

data for analysis, such as cloud applications

and Hadoop, are significant game changers

for the oil and gas business, said Moray

Laing, SAS Executive lead for Oil and Gas,

formerly at Baker Hughes.

As a result, this industry is on the precipice

of major change in their IT architectures.

Big data trends

Recently, The Data Warehousing Institute

(TDWI) released "Managing Big Data," a re-

port that explored trends in big data manage-

ment.

The report presents the findings from a sur-

vey of more than 400 practitioners about their

big data efforts.

Respondents were asked which database

management systems (DBMS) were in use

for big data management efforts.

While traditional relational DBMS systems

were at the top (38 percent), Hadoop was tied

for second place (33 percent).

In addition, it was clearly evident that the

phrase big data was synonymous with

Hadoop, in the minds of those surveyed. A

meteoric rise for a technology that only be-

came commercially viable in the last five

years.

For many organizations, establishing an en-

terprise data hub using Hadoop will be a cost-

effective solution for data capture of all data,

structured and unstructured, in a secure, man-

aged environment. When paired with addi-

tional technology applications to ensure data

quality, and to visualize and analyze the data

effectively, Hadoop is ready for prime-time.

Software companies, like Cloudera and SAS

are working together to provide processes and

technologies that accelerate data-driven in-

sights.

Dave Cotten, whose team at Cloudera sup-

ports many US oil and gas companies, says

that Cloudera's oil and gas clients are realiz-

ing multiple revenue generating and cost sav-

ings opportunities.

From real-time field operations feedback im-

proving reservoir yields, to full-fidelity elec-

tronic well record management, to mining

internal and public data to determine optimal

well spacing, customers are obtaining deeper

insights at lower costs provided by Hadoop in

an enterprise data hub.

In addition, our customers typically improve

preventative maintenance, greatly reducing

costly downtime.

Analytics on Hadoop

SAS and Cloudera recently announced tech-

nologies that move the analytic functions di-

rectly within a Hadoop cluster.

Deploying models directly in Hadoop reduces

data movement and replication, saving time

and resources - while strengthening data gov-

ernance.

With all your data in one place, simple tabular

data can mix with more complex and multi-

structured data to provide business insights

never before possible.

Organizations can run a variety of enterprise

workloads, from batch processing to ad-

vanced analytics, in a secure, managed, gov-

erned environment.

Early adoption of analytics on Hadoop has

been popping up in seismology, asset opti-

mization, commodity pricing strategies, and

production optimization.

Because SAS data visualization on Hadoop

allows companies to interactively explore bil-

lions of rows of data in seconds.

One common use case is for data validation,

finding the outliers and flagging them for fur-

ther explanation.

Because you can look at both structured and

unstructured data, like Twitter feeds or web

traffic, in one place over time, there are appli-

cations for cybersecurity as well.

Hadoop, a new data storage technology, promises to make high volume data much easier to manage in the oil and gasindustry. Alyssa Farrell of SAS explains how it works

Hadoop for oil and gas

This may be detached from any initial spe-

cific intent, the surprising nature of the asso-

ciation enticing the searcher to drill down

further which may lead to a serendipitous en-

counter.

Enhancing creativity

What is deemed surprising or intriguing by

one person, may not be by another as sug-

gested filter terms are compared with their

own cognitive map, like a game of spot the

difference.

The challenge with text co-occurrence is to

decide what to present to the user, minimiz-

ing distraction but offering potential sur-

prises, combining with traditional controlled

vocabulary (taxonomy) metadata approaches.

Companies that adopt such practices, may ex-

perience more happy accidents in the user

interface than those which do not.

Paul Cleverley and Simon Burnett areresearchers in the department of Infor-mation Management at the AberdeenBusiness School at Robert Gordon Uni-versity in Aberdeen, UK.

At the recent Society of Exploration Geo-

physicists (SEG) event in Denver in October

2014, a company called Agile Geoscience ran

a hackathon with 30 people in a room, asking

them to write a supercool geoscience appli-

cation.

David Holmes, one of the judges, selected as

the winner a crowdsourcing hot or not tool

for other peoples seismic interpretation.

You log on to an online tool with your Google

account, interpret some seismic data, and then

rate other peoples choices.

This is the future, I'm convinced, Mr

Holmes said, speaking at the Digital Energy

Journal Aberdeen conference on November

27, Doing more with Seismic Data.

There are many more exciting things the in-

dustry could do, if the seismic data systems

were on the cloud.

One US company put all of its seismic data

onto disk, and then hired 6 students from the

Colorado School of Mines and gave them ac-

cess to the entire seismic library, telling them

go and find some stuff.

Mr Holmes said it is a mystery to me why

we keep standalone workstation going as long

as we have, he said.

Geophysicists still work on personal worksta-

tions, where they spend 20 minutes loading

up all their data every morning. If they could

work directly on a cloud system it would be a

lot faster.

Managing old seismic

Yet still most oil and gas companies store

their seismic data on tape, and have very little

idea what they have, if they are storing multi-

ple copies of the same data, or do not have

what they thought they had.

Companies should care more about this

stuff. They have spent millions on acquiring it

and the cost of managing it is an unmeasur-

able fraction of that, he said.

Some companies do have a regulatory obli-

gation to keep their data in perpetuity, and it

doesnt mean a rusty 9-track no-one can

read.

A [typical] oil company is working with five

seismic data storage companies, each with

different cataloguing systems, all incompati-

ble, three million media items, including two

million 9-track tapes.

There are a finite number of read heads for

9-track tapes, he said. They are not being

manufactured any more.

Some companies are paying $10m a year in

license fees for data they're not using but can't

prove that they're not using, he said.

The trouble is, managing data is hard work,

and it always easier not to do it. Companies

ask, shall we spend lots of time and money

doing something hard with intangible busi-

ness value, or do nothing, he said.

Some physical data storage companies are

taking advantage of oil companies willingness

to take the cheap and secure option over the

short term. They offer a service where they

store your data free of charge, but charge you

big fees when you want to retrieve it, he said.

Some cloud data services are trying to get

away with the same business model. The

cost of retrieving the data can be gigantic.

The problem is that usage rates of seismic

data is typically very low, with only small

amounts of data retrieval over a time frame

measured in decades, he said.

But slowly, attitudes are changing, as compa-

nies realise the risk of not properly maintain-

ing data assets, he said, and cloud solutions

offer a cheaper alternative.

Move away from tape

Mr Holmes recommendation is to move away

from tape.

You cant just copy seismic data from tape to

disk, because the data will get corrupted. It

needs to be transferred to a different format.

Together with the data, you need to keep a

scanned copy of the tape label, logs of the re-

mastering process (gathering data from tape).

You need everything in your possession that

will allow you to recreate that nasty crumbly

9 track tape, he said.

Data management processes

In the future there will also be much stricter

data management processes, he said.

Many oil and gas companies already say that

geoscientists may not load up data them-

selves, they must give it to a data manager, to

load it and validate it, he said.

There are software tools to make this process

easier, for example where new data is loaded

to a folder, then a data manager receives an e-

mail alert. The data manager can then check

the data formatting and co-ordinates, make

any necessary transformations and check the

headers.

Working with big data

A side-effect of the growth of big data sys-

tems is that many companies now have multi-

ple systems for storing data, including their

normal archiving systems, high performance

computing (HPC) enviroments, Hadoop envi-

ronments.

They might have the same data file in all of

these systems. If they back up the data in each

environment multiple times, they can end up

with many copies of the data. One company

worked out they would have 17 copies of all

of their data, if everything had gone well, he

said.

As data volumes get bigger, keeping 17

copies of everything will get very expensive.

If we have any chance of surviving the next

few years, its going to be crucial that we

have a single instance of our data, he said.

Or companies will make a fortune selling

you vast amounts of storage you don't need.

A new term has been invented, next genera-

tion data fabric, which describes the enter-

13February / March 2015 - digital energy journal

Subsurface

EMC and the future of seismic dataDavid Holmes, chief industry executive with EMCs Global Oil & Gas Program, explained what the future of seismic datamanagement will look like

Could future seismicinterpretation couldbe done by crowd-sourcing, askedDavid Holmes, chiefindustry executive,EMC's Global Oiland Gas Program

The agreement is for LMKR's "GeoGraphix"

subsurface interpretation system to integrate

with petroWEB's "Enterprise DB" exploration

and production data management system,

built on the PPDM model.

Enterprise DB can serve as a corporate well

master, well log repository and well file man-

agement system.

By putting Enterprise DB together with Geo-

Graphix, you have a single system for manag-

ing large volumes of subsurface data, LMKR

says.

LMKR has also formed a technology partner-

ship with LUMINA Geophysical, a company

based in Houston which provides special

tools for quantitative interpretation of the sub-

surface, based on a mathematical method

called spectral decomposition. This allows

more geological information to be extracted

from geophysical data.

As a result of this partnership, LMKR will re-

lease a new software tool called Predict 3D in

early 2015. This is a multi-attribute inversion

solution based on spectral decomposition.

The multi-attribute inversion process predicts

rock properties from well logs away from and

in between the wells that have been used for

correlation. This helps understand the nature

of the reservoir away from the wells.

LMKR has also made improvements to the

user experience with its GeoGraphix 2014.2

subsurface software, improving seismic inter-

pretation speed and capability, offering larger

memory access and up-front well loading op-

timization.

There is improved integration with depth geo-

models. This means that users can easily

depth convert faults and incorporate into a

sealed earth model as well as combining seis-

mic interpretation data and well picks into the

geomodel.

Enhancements to velocity modelling and

depth conversion make it easier to depth con-

vert seismic with velocity models generated

from defined horizon-formation top relation-

ships.

LMKR has developed a 3D volume attribute

generation tool, which can manage both trace

based attributes (such as sample, window and

Hilbert), and frequency based attributes. All

of the frequency-based attributes use a

patented spectral decomposition technique for

higher resolution results.

LMKR GeoGraphix 2014 also delivers tighter

integration between geological and geophysi-

cal interpretations.

14 digital energy journal - February / March 2014

Subsurface

Developments at LMKRSubsurface data and modelling company LMKR reports that it has formed a partnership with petroWEB, an oil and gas dataand information management company based in Colorado, Canada and Houston.

prise architecture for storing and managing

information, he said.

Companies will also use object storage

which means that the analytics tools can un-

derstand the different data storage systems

you are using.

The idea of master data management will be

redundant, because companies will be able to

search all of their data at once.

Geophysicists will be able to ask complex

queries, like show me all the files I have

navigation for, which I dont know about. Or

in more specific terms, show me all of the

navigation files which have a survey name

which isn't in my survey master.

You can run that simple query against

your entire landscape, he said.

"Optique", a 4 year, $17.5m oil and gas big

data research project co-ordinated by a Uni-

versity of Oslo professor, is now in the mid-

way stage. The project has EUR 9.7m

funding from the European Union and is sup-

ported by DNV GL, Siemens, Statoil, and a

German cloud data company called "fluid

Operations".

Optique aims to develop a software platform

to help oil and gas users work with large and

complex data sets, using "semantic technolo-

gies", which includes data meaning as part of

the data model.

The project was initiated in 2010 by Univer-

sity of Oslo (UiO) professor Arild Waaler, and

launched in 2012. Total funding is Eur 13.8m

(USD 17.5m) including Eur 9.7m from the

EU.

Professor Waaler believes that this system

will be different to other big data solutions, in

that it will focus on understanding the com-

plexity (including the variety) of the data,

where most other big data solutions just focus

on working with large data volumes.

"Optique .. addresses trustworthiness by

showing where data came from and how it

has changed, providing transparency for the

end user," he said.

At the moment, geologists and engineers need

to involve the IT department if they would

like to post a complex query to their data-

bases, but with the Optique system, they can

get answers in minutes, he believes.

'This will open up new exploratory and inter-

active ways of working as users get more rel-

evant data sets in shorter time."

The results of the research are planned to be

presented in Hvik, Norway, in early 2015,

with an aim to attract more companies to get

involved, and ultimately develop methods and

technology which will be used by the industry

mainstream.

'We will deliver a good concept, but this will

not be something that can be delivered to the

industry two years from now," Professor

Waaler said.

"I hope that by then [early 2015] we have

something so impressive that the industry will

want to continue to fund this project. I am op-

timistic."

"Optique" $17.5m EU oil and gas big data researchproject now mid-way

View David Holmes talk on video athttp://www.digitalenergyjournal.com/video/1224.aspx

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Sharecat of Norway is helping oil and gas

companies put together structured informa-

tion about all of the parts and components in

their offshore operations faster, by sharing

the data.

The basic idea is that Sharecat maintains its

own databases of standard information about

millions of different parts. If you (as a cus-

tomer) have a certain part on your platform,

Sharecat might already have all the necessary

specifications and materials lists (items you

might need to purchase for it). So you can

use Sharecats data rather than collect it

again from scratch.

In a greenfield project, all suppliers, EPC

contractors and the end client will upload

data and documents, review and collaborate

in the same environment.

Sharecat has been gathering its equipment

catalogue for over 20 years and now has mil-

lions of pieces of data, said Sturle Drageset,

sales and marketing director with ShareCat,

speaking at the Digital Energy Journal Ab-

erdeen conference on November 25, Doing

More with Offshore Engineering Data.

Sharecat is based in Bergen, with offices in

Aberdeen, London and Houston, and a re-

seller agreement with WorleyParsons in Aus-

tralia.

The database can be used both in greenfield

projects, to help put together better part data-

bases faster, and in brownfield projects, to

help operators clean their data up. It also pro-

vides associated consulting services.

Sharecat has global agreements with several

oil majors, to put together a global catalogue

of suppliers for Shell, and run a central infor-

mation store for BP. It manages materials

data for Statoil.

Sharecat has a frame agreement with engi-

neering company WorleyParsons, where

Sharecat will provide specialist information

management software and services to Wor-

leyParsons to sell as part of its service to cus-

tomers.

The services are made available over the

cloud as Software as a Service (SaaS).

Data problems

It is too common for operators not to have

accurate records of what they have installed

on their rigs, he said.

We see inspection reports stating missing

certificates, missing history, impossible to

trace parts in the material master, and miss-

ing documentation and numbering informa-

tion.

This might be expected, when you consider

that it is common for operators to take deliv-

ery of an oil rig or FPSO, but they do not re-

ceive the associated documents, part

information and materials lists, in a usable

format.

The problem can be ignored until it is time to

do modifications, but at this point, engineers

can spend 2-3 hours gathering specification

data (tags) for each component, before they

can put together a purchase order for new

materials.

Every time any information is missing, you

need to search for information and involve

colleagues, which take up hours of expensive

time. Poor information will lead to incorrect

purchase, increasing the cost even more.

On greenfield projects, it should be much

easier to gather necessary information.

But operators are often overwhelmed by the

amount of data. The operator may deal with

only a small number of contractors directly,

but each contractor will go on to send hun-

dreds (or thousands) of purchase orders to

their suppliers and manufacturers, which

generates an enormous amount of documen-

tation.

Sometimes documents for a single compo-

nent (such as a motor) will be sent back to

the operator many times, because this com-

ponent is used as part of many different

pieces of equipment.

The information is sent by email, which

means it easily gets lost, and no-one is sure if

it is correct.

Meanwhile, the operators projects staff do

not necessarily have an incentive to make

sure that the data is good, because after the

project they will move onto a new project,

and leave the data problem to the companys

operations staff.

It can take many thousands man hours to put

together a complete parts database for a new

offshore asset, he said, so it is not a surprise

that the work is often not done, and the proj-

ect is handed to operations staff with only 30

per cent of information available.

We end up with poor and missing informa-

tion in the material master, he said.

As the industry has to lower costs, the EPC

(Engineering Procurement and Construction)

companies must work more efficient and at

the same time deliver better quality. This is

what Sharecats products are tailored for, Mr

Drageset said.

We also experience drilling companies to

struggle with procedures and routines to

build up information correctly, he said. A lot

of data is only entered as free text, and no

possibility to retrieve crucial information in

later maintenance, modifications and pur-

chase of equipment and parts.

Sharecat

Sharecats service is to reduce the overall

workload, by maintaining and continually

updating the shared catalogue of part data

and deliver quality data to the clients.

So for example data about a part such as a

specific ABB motor, which might be used in

thousands of different pieces equipment on

many different offshore assets, information

only needs to be entered once and re-used

many times.

Sharecat provides templates which can be

given to engineering contractors so they

know what data they need to provide, and

which can be automatically uploaded into

Drilling and production technology

16 digital energy journal - February / March 2015

Sharecat - a faster way to make offshore databasesSharecat is helping companies put together databases of technical information much faster, with global agreements with BP,Shell and Statoil

Helping you put together offshore databases faster Sturle Drageset, sales and marketing manager,ShareCat

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