Why Digital Oilfield?
Digital Oilfield (DOF) promises to achieve integrated operations to measure, model and control the oil and gas field assets, where decisions can be made effectively and consistently by the right people at the right time.
Impact of technology can be huge across all stages of oil and gas exploration and production life cycle, such as reducing lifting costs, increasing or optimizing production and the economic potential of the reservoir(s), enhanced oil recovery, real-time interventions and innovative solutions to optimize assets' performance, and integrating the various functional silos within the organization and across its trading partners.
A digitization initiative also helps to address several challenges that often exist in a field that can limit innovation, optimization, cost savings and access to information:
- Low visibility into field, reservoir , well and injector performance
- Lack of timely interventions
- 50-75% of time spent looking for data - the high cost of not finding information, or finding it late, include faulty decisions, duplicated efforts, lost productivity and missed opportunities
- Data has to be rekeyed, since applications don't talk to each other
- Lack of effective monitoring of temperature, pressure, flow, vibration and emissions which have potential environmental impact
- Production allocations are erroneous
- Difficult to leverage 3rd party applications or resources
- Reactive, rather than proactive operations
- No automated alerts - analysis needs to be performed to detect issues
- High risk that operations or Enhanced Oil Recovery are not optimal
- Inability to recognize patterns
- Hard to determine root causes of issues
- Lack of effectiveness in measuring actual performance against work plans
- Compliance issues
- Lack of knowledge sharing and collaboration - wheels are reinvented by different fields within the same company
- Performance tracking against critical measures
