Software


Sep 1, 2006 - ...

10 downloads 333 Views 1MB Size

September 2006

Issue 3

Systems approach to knowledge management Better ways to assess drilling risk In-well fibre optics Preparing platforms to operate unmanned

Game Changing E&P Results

Know how. Put all the pieces together. Achieve breakthrough team performance with Schlumberger Information Solutions. Avocet* Integrated Asset Modeler software. “Resolved discrepancies in simulations and saved tens of millions USD on upfront facilities cost.” SPE paper 90976. Petrel* software. “Sidetracked lateral wells through the predicted high-quality reservoir and enhanced average production by 3,000 bbl/d in each well.” Hardy Oil and Gas. ECLIPSE* software through rapid response services. “Made critical field development decisions in a tight timeframe while achieving operational expenditure and activity goals.” BG Group. Petrel software. “Accurately visualized the geometry of a complex fault system and drilled the second most productive basement well in Vietnam's history.” Hoan Vu JOC.

Experience a whole new level of effectiveness. www.slb.com/sis_breakthrough

*Mark of Schlumberger © 2006 Schlumberger

06-IS-252

Contents Software

3

Flow simulations in real time Norwegian flow modelling company Scandpower Petroleum Technology has adapted its OLGA multiphase flow simulator so it can provide information about the flow which is happening right now

4

Siemens oilfield performance management software Sept 2006

Issue 3

Digital Energy Journal 213 Marsh Wall, London, E14 9FJ, UK www.digitalenergyjournal.com Tel +44 207 510 4935 Fax +44 207 510 2344

Editor Karl Jeffery [email protected]

Technical editor Keith Forward [email protected]

Production, design and circulation Katerina Jeffery [email protected]

Advertising sales David Jeffries Only Media Ltd 1 Santley Street, London SW4 7QA Tel 44 207 733 1199 Fax 44 207 733 1615 [email protected] Digital Energy Journal is published on print 8 times a year, supported by a free website and email news service We cover information technology and communications in upstream oil and gas production, drilling / completions and exploration. Each issue of Digital Energy Journal is mailed to 2000 oil and gas executives, as well as distributed at major trade shows such as ATCE, Petex, Digital Energy and Intelligent Energy. Each issue of Digital Energy Journal is also posted online for free download - our June 2006 issue had 1600 electronic downloads. For lists of sample readers to Digital Energy Journal (company name plus job title), please see www.digitalenergyjournal.com. Front cover photo - Halliburton's Real Time Decision Centre. Photo courtesy Halliburton Additional material on our website www.digitalenergyjournal.com You can download our report of the IQPC conference in Amsterdam in June ‘Future Fields’ - including speeches from Microsoft, UK Department of Trade and Industry, Norwegian Petroleum Directorate, Alcatel and Invensys.

Siemens company IndX software has launched a new performance management software tool for the oil and gas industry, ‘Oil Field Management Intelligent Pack’, which is designed to provide information about emerging problems in the field

7

Shell - 60+ per cent ultimate recovery, Frans van den Berg, Smart Fields Foundation manager with Shell, said that Shell believes that technology can help it get towards better than 60% ultimate recovery

9

Systems not stepwise approach to knowledge management David Storey, principal IT technical adviser with the Technical Systems Group of Australian oil and gas company Santos, believes the oil and gas industry needs to change the way it approaches knowledge management in order to meet more success

Better ways to assess drilling risk Scott M Shemwell of US oil and gas IT consultancy Strategic Decision Sciences suggests that drilling risk can be evaluated much better with a much broader, systems approach

E-purchasing for service suppliers Oil and gas electronic purchasing portal OFS Portal is testing the water with services to enable first tier service suppliers to use it for their own purchasing

Structuring oil and gas information Tanker software company Ulysses Systems talks about the concept of structuring data to co-ordinate complex activities

Premium Drilling signs to SpecTec Premium Drilling, an operator of 16 jack-up rigs, has signed up to use maintenance and spares management software by SpecTec, including for condition monitoring

Hosting your data remotely Digital Energy Exchange of Aberdeen is growing a service to remotely host data, so companies can collaborate without one going behind another’s firewall

Marise Mikulis, Microsoft Marise Mikulis, worldwide oil and gas industry manager with Microsoft Corporation, speaking at the IQPC Future Fields conference in Amsterdam in June, said that a lot of her passion is about accelerating adoption of software tools in the oil and gas industry.

Communications and Monitoring Real time rig monitoring Telecom International Incorporated of South Carolina is developing offshore oilrig remote monitoring services over Inmarsat

Sakhalin remote rig monitoring An Inmarsat monitoring system installed in a Sakahlin unmmanned rig under construction, 800km offshore, reports no problems after a year apart from a defective camera

10 12 14 16 17 18 21 22

Automation Weatherford’s fibre optic sensing systems Weatherford has installed the first in-well fibre optic seismic system for BP Norway, is developing fibre optic sensing systems with Statoil, and helped Chevron reduce well failure rates from 30 to 10 per cent.

Unmanned rigs Rigs that operate unmanned - Invensys believes that US oil and gas companies can learn from the experiences of European ones, which are far more likely to build platforms which can operate unattended

Integrated Control Systems Invensys has launched a new middleware software suite called InFusion, which makes it easier to gather data from different control systems

25 27 29

September 2006 - digital energy journal

1

Software Halliburton's 'first fully integrated' Decision Centre Halliburton's Digital and Consulting Solutions (DCS) division has opens what it believes to be the industry's first 'completely integrated and fully digital Real Time Decision Centre,' for an [unnamed] international oil company to monitor its drilling rigs worldwide. Halliburton says that this is the first centre with its own applications hosting environment, connected to its PetroBank data storage system. There is a Sony SXRD display system, with a new control system that can be customised to every company, asset team, and individuals using it, based on their workflows and processes. The purpose is to provide staff with easy, secure access to all of their data, applications and workflow processes. The philosophy is to break down all the 'silos' between traditional visualisation and operation centres, bringing all the hardware, software and people into one place, so they can make decisions collectively, Halliburton says. Halliburton says that some of its customers have experienced a tenfold improvement in productivity when asset teams collaborate in a common environment, and early adopters of real time monitoring can see cost savings of 35 to 50 per cent. "These are compelling figures that could have an immediate positive impact on any size organization,"

Halliburton’s 'completely integrated and fully digital Real Time Decision Centre’

the company says. Intel, Silicon Graphics, NetApp, Hewlett-Packard and Cyviz are all providing products and services as part of Halliburton's Real Time Decision Centre offering. www.halliburton.com

IBM acquires MRO software IBM has acquired oil and gas asset management software company MRO for $740m. MRO makes software which companies use to decide how to buy, maintain and retire assets, such as production equipment, facilities, transportation and IT. As well as the oil and gas industry, the software is used in utilities, manufacturing, pharmaceutical, and telecommunications. Oil and gas customers include BP, ExxonMobil, China National Offshore Oil Company (CNOOC) and DTE Energy. IBM bought MRO as part of its strategy to develop a range of business consulting, IT and software services to help clients optimise and develop their businesses. IBM will integrate MRO´s technology into its IBM Software and IBM Global Services offerings, providing its clients with a standard way to

2

manage their assets. This means that customers will be able to buy asset management software and consulting from the same place. This should make it easier to implement more complex asset monitoring solutions, for example including RFID and embedded chips. IBM will establish MRO Software as a business unit within its Tivoli software unit. "In a recent IBM study, 40 percent of CEOs indicated that asset utilization would be a key focus in strengthening financial performance," says IBM. "This acquisition will provide companies with a single view into all of their assets, helping them to maximize efficiencies, drive productivity, and innovate business processes across the enterprise." The two companies have been working together since 1996. www.mro.com

digital energy journal - September 2006

"The Real Time Decision Centre is designed to be one of the most fully used, multi-functional centers at our customers' sites - a work space that will increase productivity and allow them to operate more profitably in today's booming market"

Wellogix upgrades Complex Services Management Suite Wellogix of Houston has announced plans to develop the Next generation of its ´Complex Services Management (CSM) Suite´ solution for planning, procurement and payment of complex oilfield services, working in partnership with Microsoft. The software is designed to be used by engineering, procurement and financal personnel. Using the SharePoint Portal Server, company engineers can put together project teams, specify who can see what information, manage project and well-specific information, put together requests for Complex Services proposals and evaluate them, put together service provider contracts for Complex Services, and manage electronic field tickets and invoices. CSM Suite is built on a Microsoft

platform. It runs on 2007 Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server and uses Microsoft SQL Server 2005, Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0, SharePoint and Microsoft Office Business Scorecard Manager 2005. CSM Suite has been through a number of architect design review sessions at Microsoft´s Technology Center in Austin, Texas. "We decided to form a strategic relationship with Wellogix because of its portfolio of patented technology, as well as its leadership's willingness to gain early insight into the opportunity for the development and delivery of solutions using SQL Server 2005, SharePoint and Business Scorecard Manager," said Marise Mikulis, Microsoft's world wide oil and gas industry manager. www.wellogix.com

Software Scandpower simulator - information about current flow Norwegian flow modelling company Scandpower Petroleum Technology has adapted its OLGA multiphase flow simulator so it can crunch real time data and provide information about current operations. It can also provide predictions for the future based on current data. The new system is called "e-dynamic production management" (edpm). It has three operations modes. A 'real time' mode tells them what is happening now; a 'look ahead' mode can be used for forecasting; and a 'what if' mode can be used to try out different approaches and see what might happen. This mode may also be used for training. In real time, it provides estimates of pressure, temperature, flowrates in different areas of the system. The system can also provide warnings when slugs are likely to arrive. It can provide information about liquid accumulation in gas pipes. The monitoring provides information about leaks, erosion and deposition. In the 'what if mode', it can work out the best way to set the controls after a shut-down to achieve the fastest start up, for example. Operators can make sure they can get the production level they want, avoiding hydrate formation, wax formation, liquid buildup and when to do pigging operations. They can predict the daily volume, speed and structure of slugs. They use it to work out how long systems will take to cool down after being shut down. They can do simulations for the future to plan production. Remote staff can access the data,

You can obtain in-depth information about flow through your pipes in real time using Scandpower's OLGA simulator combined with data from the pipeline

and work on tuning the models, alarms and alerts. Edpm is being used by BP at the Na Kika oilfield in deepwater Gulf of Mexico, as part of its advanced warning system, providing support to flow assurance and subsea engineers. The Na Kika field operates in water depths of 6,350 feet, with production wells 7,600 feet deep. The water pressure at the bottom of the ocean is 3,000 psi. There are a num-

ber of subsea fields tied back to the host rig. The software is also being used in an underbalanced well design (UBD) being drilled and operated by Shell. The software was used to provide information about the past, present and future of the well bore fluid dynamics, and work out how to maintain the underbalanced condition by controlling bottom hole and well head pressure. Scandpower claims that OLGA,

the simulator model which edpm is built on, is the most advanced flow simulator in the world. OLGA was developed as a tool for designing and monitoring flow systems out of the wells, through flow lines and into the receiving facilities. It can model non-steady state flows (eg during start up or shut down), not just steady state as most other simulators on the market do. www.scandpowerpt.com

IHS to give every well unique ID Oil and gas information provider IHS Inc has signed a letter of intent with the Petrotechnical Open Standards Consortium (POSC) to develop an industry standard set of unique well identifiers, which will cover all 4 million known oil and gas wells in the world. This will address the problem of oil companies, service companies and regulators having different practises for naming wells, which can lead to problems reconciling data about the same well in financial and technical databases. IHS will also provide standard

identifiers for all new wells. It will put together a Master Well Index. IHS has been offering well ID services to its customers since the 1990s. Now the service will be available to the whole industry. A formal agreement covering the service deliverables will be announced by IHS and POSC by the end of 2006, and in the interim IHS will provide a basic service. "The service (should) be as open as possible so that no oil company, service company or data vendor is precluded from obtaining a standard well ID," says IHS. POSC has been working on the

project since 2003. "IHS has extensive experience with the regional variances of well ID systems around the world, not only because of their management of well identifications, but also because of their network of global experts positioned in local markets," says POSC. www.ihsenergy.com

Soon, every well will have a universal unique ID number

September 2006 - digital energy journal

3

Software Siemens oilfield performance management software - new levels Siemens company IndX software has launched a new performance management software tool for the oil and gas industry, ‘Oil Field Management Intelligent Pack’, which provides information to upstream production supervisors about current and emerging problems, so they can make better decisions about how to manage assets and respond to situations. All technical personnel, engineers, supervisors, managers, can instantly access the technical information from any company PC. The software crunches real time data and provides information geared to the specific roles / responsibilities of different users. It provides information, about production wells, metering stations, injection systems, environmental monitoring stations and gas / oil separation plants. Engineers and technicians can create displays for reading data from multi-phase flow meters, well tests, work orders and field production maps. There are tools for energy management, sand management, moni-

toring corrosion, monitoring well shut-in history, looking at inner casing pressure monitoring, water management and pump monitoring. Users can establish design and operating limit envelopes for assets and specific pieces of equipment, and receive real time monitoring to show that operations are within these limits. The software should make it easy to recognise trends and patterns in operational performance, and keep production levels optimal. Siemens says it has included best practices and operating procedures of oil field management engineers and operators around the world in the software. There have been software packages on the market for some time which present oilfield data for the specific needs of oilfield operators, production engineers, reservoir engineers, earth scientists and financial analysts. But what is unique about this system, Siemens believes, is that it connects together data from financial and operational systems, so for example the operator gets the operational data in a financial context.

Gathering real time production data using Siemens IndX

Information is easy to find, and accessible quickly during production upsets, when it is most needed. For example, operators can use the technical information about the well (eg decrease in pressure, water production, sand production, well test information) to help adjust the financial production allocation models of how much revenue is expected from each well, instead of basing financial predictions on one well test and not changing it as production from the well changes over time. The software can also be used to improve management of alarms. It can switch off unnecessary alarms triggered by maintenance tasks; it

can provide information about alarms triggered in remote locations so operators can investigate if it is necessary to go to the location. Users can monitor specific critical process variables for deviations, setting up alerts by e-mail or pager if certain conditions are met. E-mail alerts can be sent with detailed maintenance information about the specific asset causing the problem and associated technical drawings and documentation, work orders information, maintenance history and information suggesting corrective action.

For those that want to coordinate intensely critical and expensive collaborative processes.

Ulysses Task Assistant:

Co-ordination systems for the most critical and highest turnover environments.

Grown up in the most traditionally dispersed business in the world we are ready to serve the next industry up in the energy hierarchy.

Contact details: Ulysses Systems UK Ltd , 3rd Floor, Transworld House, 100 City Road, London, EC1Y 2BP, England Phone: +44 (0)20 7324 5700 • Fax: +44 (0)20 7324 5701 Email: [email protected] • Web: www.ulysses-systems.com

4

digital energy journal - September 2006

Software Scandpower Petroleum Technology acquired by VCs Venture Capitalists Altor has acquired a 70 per cent stake of Scandpower Petroleum Technology, a Norwegian company which makes flow modelling, drilling and reservoir modelling software. The company was previously owned by HitecVision Private Equity, which will retain a 30 per cent holding. Altor says it is expecting 'strong growth' in the company, particularly in international markets, as a result of the acquisition. "We have a number of growth opportunities that we plan to pursue with our new financial resources. We believe working with Altor and

HitecVision will provide a good combination of continuity and new thinking that will support us on this journey," says Scandpower. HitecVision believes that Scandpower developed its organisation, product portfolio and international 'footprint' during its tenure fully owned by HitecVision. Altor manages a fund of Eur 1.8bn, with investments including Lindorff, Ability Group (AGR), Relacom, Simrad Yachting, Dynapac, Byggmax, Meyn, Aalborg Industries, Ferrosan, PaloDEx and Nimbus Boats. HitecVision manages $410m and grew out of oil service company Hitec ASA. www.scandpowerpt.com

Duvernay Oil Corp buys esi.execute Duvernay Oil Corporation of Alberta has bought a license to esi.execute software, for tracking its wells, tasks, dates and costs. The company bought the software so that all the different groups of employees involved in bringing a well online could share data, rather than retype it as it moves between different software applications. Companies can use the software to manage all their operations related to wells, up to the time the asset comes onstream. It can also be used for re-completions, workovers, production optimisations, surface facilities management, and abandonments / reclamations.

Employees can access information about the status of each project or well, access all the documents associated with the project, and get different levels of summary information. The software enables all processes to be auditable, and makes it easier for people in different functional groups to work together. This should lead to more streamlined processes and reduced cycle times. 3esi recently signed a 'original equipment manufacturer' (OEM) agreement with software company BEA Systems, to use its AquaLogic software as a basis for its esi.environment software. www.3esi.com

Chevron outsources IT infrastructure to Getronics

Enertia Software develops financial tools

Chevron has signed a contract for over $10m to outsource its North American IT network infrastructure to US company Getronics.

Upstream accounting software company Enertia Software has developed new functionality to integrate mapping systems, enabling all property, equipment and facilities to be shown on a map. Data can be accessed and added to the map from anywhere in the system.

It will also take over monitoring and management of over 1,200 network routers and switches, and ultimately manage 5,000 enterprise network devices. Getronics will also deliver 'onsite' services to certain Chevron facilities in the US and support over 100 additional US sites. It will provide management and monitoring of SCADA, microwave and other systems for Chevron Pipe Line Company. Getronics offers an outsource company IT manager service, taking

responsibility for managing PCs, laptops, PDAs, servers, data storage and core office software, using a mixture of remotely delivered services and on site work. The contract fits in with Chevron's strategy to aggregate the services delivered to its business units. www.getronics.com

Halliburton's free 'eRedBook' field calculations software Halliburton has launched free 'eRedBook' software for calculations commonly made in the oilfield. The software can be downloaded free of charge from the Halliburton website People using corporate computers which do not allow downloads can go to their home computers, download the software and burn it onto a CD-ROM; Halliburton even provides an image for a sticky label to put on the CD. It builds on Halliburton's 'RedBook'

cementing tables reference guide, first published by Halliburton in 1929. The software contains all of the data in the original guide, but with expanded content. The software can be used for quick and reliable calculations for computations used in daily operations. There is also a tool to enable engineers to share well schematics with other engineers quickly. Users can access information about Halliburton's Energy Services Group product lines. They can access the American

It is possible to download aerial photographs and topographic map data directly into the system using Microsoft Terraserver. It can also integrate with data from WhiteStar and Petroleum Geographics. Enertia has developed new functionality for its financial analysis and reporting tools.Software upgrades

include advanced column layout features, and a tool to create Excel tables or charts which are automatically recalculated whenever the underlying data is changed. "These new features pretty much allow the user to gather as much data in whatever period format they desire, then securely link the results to Excel for any further analysis and charting they need," says Enertia. The company released new functionality to facilitate SOX compliance and provide detailed audit tracking, making it possible to control every change made to the data and provide a clear history of the changes. www.enertia-software.com

Petroleum Institute's latest pipe data. "eRedBook software is the most user-friendly, most complete digital oilfield toolkit available today, and it's simply a smarter way for industry professionals to work," the company says. Users can download the whole software or just the applications they want. Users can copy and paste data into other software. The software will automatically update itself with new content, revised API pipe data and new features as they become available. www.halliburton.com/esg/eredbook/erb_dnld.jsp

September 2006 - digital energy journal

5

Software Endeavour outsources IT to CentreBeam Houston-based North Sea oil and gas company Endeavour International Corporation has signed a deal with US outsource IT company CentreBeam to manage its IT infrastructure. Endeavour sees itself as a 'niche' company, which has a business opportunity in the North Sea, as the major oil and gas companies gradu-

ally leave to seek better opportunities elsewhere. Endeavour believes it has a lower operating overhead and better technical insights than the oil majors, and so is able to take advantage of reservoirs not viable for the larger companies. The company is using a new 3D seismic database to try to identify overlooked or new oil and gas prospects. It has license rights to almost 105,000 km2 of 3 dimensional seismic data over the continental shelves of the UK, Norway and the

Netherlands. It also has access to regional maps taken from 110,000 km2 of 2D seismic data around 1,200 wells. "We believe no other firm currently has access to comparable seismic data of this size and quality in the North Sea," the company says. Endeavour's strategy is to maintain a lean staff focussing on developing value from the seismic database. CentreBeam was put to the test when Hurricane Rita threatened to destroy Houston. CentreBeam staff in San Jose helped Endeavour employees to put the seismic data onto their own notebook computers,

Vietnamese oil companies buy Roxar´s Tempest Vietnamese oil and gas companies Hoan Vu Joint Operating Company and Hoang Long Joint Operating Company has signed up to buy Roxar´s reservoir simulation software Tempest. Roxar will also supply a detailed training program to help personnel make best use of the software. The training will emphasise the need of incorporating all available data when constructing geological and simulation models, and adopting a multidisciplinary approach. Other Roxar customers in Vietnam include BP, Petronas Carigali (Vietnam), Japan Vietnam Petroleum Company and PetroVietnam. Roxar is works closely with the Vietnam Petroleum Institute. Roxar opened an office in Ho Chi Minh in May 2005.

basement reservoirs, it is essential that accurate and robust models are fully simulated to reduce risk and uncertainty," says Roxar. It is possible that the two Vietnamese companies will buy Roxar´s reservoir modelling solution IRAP RMS, in particular its RMSFracPerm module for incorporating fracture modelling into the simu-

www.centerbeam.com

lation, Roxar says. Tempest is a reservoir simulation tool which can simulate a wide range of physical processes including black oil, compositional, dual porosity, steam, coal bed methane and polymer injection. It was recently developed to add a new method for modelling naturally fractured reservoirs, with a Single Grid Dual Porosity approach. This can halve the run time compared to conventional dual porosity models, Roxar says. Another recent development to Tempest is a Tensor Permeability option which can be used to describe complex heterogeneous reservoir systems. The standard Tempest modules are Tempest-MORE, for black oil simulation modes; Tempest-View for simulation pre and post processing; Tempest-PVTx for fluid characterisation; and Tempest-Venture, for economic evaluation and risk analysis, estimating cash flow and net present value from the reservoir model data. www.roxar.com

Merrick Systems updates dashboard tool

Schlumberger E&P software to Romania university

Houston oil and gas software company Merrick Systems has released the latest version of its Carte software which provides a web-based 'dashboard' tool to monitor oil and gas production trends.

Schlumberger has signed an agreement with the Petroleum Gas university of Ploiesti, Romania, to supply exploration and production software, and ongoing technical maintenance, worth $9.5m.

Merrick pulls together data from different sources, including engineering, operations and economics, putting all the data on the same page. Users can view it in different graphical formats and export data. The new version has a useradministration function, which allows companies to add any data

6

Hoan Vu and Hoang Long will use the software in Vietnam´s offshore blocks 9-2, operated by Hoan Vu, and 16-1, operated by Hoang Long. Vietnam is estimated to have 6.5 to 8.5 billion barrels of oil and 75100 trillion cubic feet of gas. "With much of its production coming from fractured, offshore

so they could carry on working from wherever they were. "With a company that is relying on the interpretation of a data base as a competitive advantage, it is critical that we partner with an information technology company that is responsive and understands the importance of science to our business," says Aimee Stadtfield, of Endeavour's corporate IT executive office. Endeavour also needs good IT to help it comply with Sarbanes-Oxley requirements.

element of their own to the dashboard, without having to write any new code. Another new function is the ability to map data trends from individual wells, alongside other wells, so for example workers can compare performance data for a new well with older wells. Individual users can customise data views for their own needs. So for example analysts can use it to access variance reports, and managers can use it to get a complete picture of their upstream operations. Users can also access near real time data. www.MerrickSystems.com

digital energy journal - September 2006

Schlumberger is doing this to help students learn in a high-tech environment, and get familiar with its software. Schlumberger has been recruiting engineers from the University since the beginning of 2004. "We believe the graduates are well equipped to manage the challenges we face on a daily basis," says

David Waterland, general manager, Schlumberger, Continental Europe. "The training programs developed at Petroleum Gas University of Ploiesti are unique within Romania and they provide the local oil and gas industry with the essential expertise." "The Schlumberger software packages make an essential contribution to the graduates' development, giving them the chance to model and interpret the results of specific processes from the oil and gas industry," says University Rector Vlad Ulmanu. www.slb.com

Software

Shell - 60 per cent ultimate recovery Frans van den Berg, Shell Frans van den Berg, Smart Fields Foundation Manager with Shell, speaking at the IQPC Future Fields conference in Amsterdam in June, said that Shell believes that technology can help it get 'towards better than 60 per cent ultimate recovery.’ hell has established, we want smart technology in all of our existing fields and in all of the new fields," he said. "We want a real time view of what's going on," he said. "We have field wide monitoring of what's going on. We get production history. It alerts us if something isn't responding the way it should," he said. Without a real time view of what is going on, the only way to spot problems is when you see that the flow from the rig has reduced, and the only way to fix problems is putting experts in a boat and sending them out to a rig. "It can take 24 hours between a well dying and us having it back online," he said. "I asked Schlumberger, how many wells in the industry have real time data sent to office," he said. "The answer was 5 per cent. In Shell it is 10 per cent." Oil companies must face a market with higher hydrocarbon demands, he said. They must be committed to the environment and its sustainable development, have leading technology to handle new complex reservoirs and mature fields, and operate safely, at all times, regardless of the challenges. Shell is implementing a range of different technologies to achieve this, he said, including subsea technology, 4D seismic, real time data from remote operations, 'intelligent' completions, real time reservoir information, 3D virtual technology and visualisation, operational / financial reporting, integrated supply chains, transactional processing. It is also using e-learning, including home learning. "The key concept is having the ability to optimise," he said. "We need to do everything a lot faster." Developments in the smart fields concept are rapidly gaining in momentum, he said. "I rarely meet people who say, it's all wrong. We're getting more detailed discussion rather than general disbelief. [They see that] we are collecting oil we would otherwise be unable to produce." One particular benefit of smart technology is having better control of water flooding, he said. "The conventional way is to open the producers and hope for the best," he said. "The smart way is to analyse all the results. You see that one rock is more permeable - the water goes through faster." "You can get 20 per cent more oil out and 15 per cent less water. In many cases, we are not constrained by anything other than being able to manage the produced water," he said. "Less water production has an enormous value."

S

Mr van den Berg talked about the Draugen Field, 160km offshore Norway, where Shell maintains a very detailed reservoir simulation model, including doing water flood simulations. It does repeated seismic surveys (3D seismic) so it can spot the oil which is not being drained properly and work out how to tackle it. In one example, Shell found that the well they were planning to drill was close to where the waterfront was, so it moved the well. "We can see what's going on and change what we were planning," he said. One priority is developing a standard within Shell for its smart fields systems. "We have 200 assets we work with, and many hundreds of fields," he said. "We need a standard architecture that makes this possible without re-inventing the wheel." "We now standardise - it helps this kind of stuff enormously. We have a standard data acquisition and control architecture." Shell's tool 'Production Universe,' is used for well monitoring and optimisation. It provides real time information what is coming out of each well. "The system estimates the total flow in real time. We can see the estimated flow in comparison with the total measured flow," he said. The biggest challenge, he said, is change management. "A lot of people don't like opening valves on a PC," he said. "We have to go through awareness training with all asset management teams." Shell did particularly well with change management on the Brunei Champion field, he said. "They didn't go with a top down change management program," he said. "The top manager had a strong belief, so people felt comfortable to try out and fail here and there." "We had a small team that went to the platform, and listened to guys and gradually designed solutions, so people on the field understood what was going to hit them. We had a support desk. We started with a few things and gradually grew." "They are gradually building up from small to big, designing whole new fields as 'smart fields'. They are trying to build things in from the start they will need."

Legacy systems Shell has a large amount of legacy equipment in its wells, which either doesn't produce data, or is not connected to the IT system, or produces bad data. "There's a huge amount of historic kit out there which is not connected," he said. A lot of the data is generated by instruments

Frans van den Berg, Smart Fields Foundation Manager with Shell

which were calibrated 15 years ago. "We're calibrating them correctly," he said. "I ask reservoir engineers, is the production data good enough to do reservoir management with," he said. "They say mmm. If you ask them over a beer, they say its no so good. We haven't put in the tools to do it." "We have a production history, but we're not sure what came out of each well at each time. "Sometimes we have to make a model and try to work out what the well did. We need to get better at having the production history," he said.

Better collaboration Improving collaboration between different staff members is also a priority. "We need to get away from how we worked before - we acquired data, geologists built a model, reservoir people understood the reservoir, production engineers understood the production," he said. "We need to get everyone to sit together, to do their work in one room. Get the four key disciplines together." "We need integrated processes where [for example] everyone thought about what would or wouldn't happen if we put in a compressor."

Security Shell is making more and more connections between different parts of its network all the time, which means additional security risks. "People get really nervous," he said. "Everybody is struggling with the same thing." "We build more links because we want to," he said. "For example, we might have someone at the end of the globe monitoring a compressor he knows all about." "We've had times when pieces of our system have been shutdown by viruses," he said. "But of course we had redundant systems [so no damage was caused]." The systems are designed so that if there is any concern about hacking, it is possible to immediately isolate the communications network from the control system. Mr van den Berg said he thought that using Windows "increases the risk seriously, not because of Windows but because viruses work on Windows." This was disputed by Marise Mikulis, head of oil and gas with Microsoft, who said that there could be threats and hacking with all different types of software, and also people don't realise that new versions of Windows are much more secure than older versions.

September 2006 - digital energy journal

7

Distributed at SPE's ATCE event September 24-27 San Antonio, TX PETEX November 21 -23 London, UK Sign up to our free e-mail newsletter at www.digitalenergyjournal.com receive the latest news and feature articles in your inbox every Thursday

Software

Systems not stepwise approach to knowledge management – Santos principal IT advisor The oil and gas industry needs to act fast to adopt a systems approach to knowledge management, rather than its current step-wise approach, says David Storey, principal IT technical adviser with the Technical Systems Group of Australian oil and gas company Santos

avid Storey, principal IT technical advisor in the technical systems group of Australian oil and gas company Santos, believes that the oil and gas industry needs to act very quickly to improve its knowledge management systems, but the industry is not going about it in the best way. No-one doubts the urgency with which the oil and gas industry needs to create better KID (knowledge, information and data) systems as the amount of data and information rapidly increases and the number of people entering the workforce decreases. But the current approach the industry takes, a stepwise approach of data to information to decisions to action, is not the best, he suggests. “The normal approach is to try to reduce large data and information sets to just what is needed to make a decision and act,” he says, but this does not seem to be working. “Knowledge, Information and Data in the oil and gas industry is now known to a number as managed chaos,” he says. “It has taken over 10 years working on data management and more than five years working on information management to get to where we are now. There has been comment that the industry cannot come together and crack this nut.” The normal oil industry technique is to try to reduce a work process to its raw elements, to make it easier to automate. But this can miss out crucial dependencies and interactions, and tends to bring more information to decision makers’ desks, rather than less. Also, there is no framework for people to make decisions the computer hasn’t predicted they will make. The system is not geared for the complexity of continuous decision making that people do. “The industry needs to keep its operations running well and there are many decisions and actions required every instant, for that to happen, for a worldwide enterprise,” he says. “There is the possibility that the industry has applied its talent and its schooled methods and spent too much time inventorying data and information instead of looking at the situation from a completely different angle: “what is the use of the data and information?” he says. “We have been applying a divide and conquer approach and that is clearly inadequate.” “The reason why knowledge, information and data is complicated is because we are not treating it as the connected whole that it is,” he says.

D

Systems Mr Storey suggests that instead of seeing information as a stepwise flow of data to information to decisions to results, companies instead should look at data, results, knowledge (tacit and explicit), information, decisions and action, together as one integrated system, with information flowing in both directions. The starting off point for building such a system could be working out what specific information people need to make their decisions, and then build a system to provide them with that information. Mr Storey compares this idea to how Triage works in medicine, deciding who to treat when the number of patients needing treatment exceeds the medical resources available. The decision is made with simultaneous knowledge both of the needs of the patients and the medical resources, not trying to make a stepwise approach starting with gathering comprehensive information about the number of patients and their medical requirements, then using this information to decide who to treat. “You have a simple game plan when you would normally be overwhelmed by the number of casualties. You go into Triage to sort out who to treat based on limited capability to deliver care and limited facts to decide and act,” he says. “The same applies to firefighters’ methods. You find out a few things to get your terms of reference and you decide, then act. “Decisions require just the right amount of data and information to execute,” he says. “In an action world doing is key, but doing the right thing requires applied intellect and timing and the right information.” “We don’t need the Library of Congress but just the facts that service decisions and action,” he says. “Some things in this world need only a routine answer, not a treatise to win a Nobel Prize.” “Data and information must be streamlined for people to make decisions and act.”

The unknown unknowns “Going beyond known actions is an important goal. Converting ideas into actions is particularly important. But the prize is pushing the idea space ever into the unknown and trying to convert the unknown to the known,” he says. “In the oil and gas industry, too often we are navel gazing at all the options of what to do in a given situation. Or we have given a person the freedom to do it his way.

“There are many things in this world that we can give a pretty good process to follow to resolve. These situations only need specific facts to decide and act upon. But if the oil and gas industry prides itself on exploration there is more to do than just service known decisions and actions,” he says. “This is a larger process with the larger process with the possibility of more enduring scope and return,” he says. “If we applied this type of approach more we could be at the beach, and more time could be spared for idea generation and applying ourselves.” “There is more to apply ourselves to, than continuing to serve repetitious things we know how to do or work out how they work.”

David Storey is principal IT technical adviser with the CIO, development systems and Technical Systems Group of Australian Mr Storey worked in the oil and gas industry for 30 years for Schlumberger, Oracle and now Santos Ltd. covering many technical and business domains of both upstream and downstream in Europe, Middle East, Africa, North America and now Australia. "I have heard the phrase "Waiting on Schlumberger" many times in my early years in oil and gas. I have done a lot of waiting for the industry's applied intellect to deliver smart oilfields," he says. "I know the difference between the expressions "Have a go" and Go for it".

September 2006 - digital energy journal

9

Software

Assessing drilling risk Scott M Shemwell of oil and gas IT consultancy Strategic Decision Sciences suggests that drilling risk can be evaluated taking into account a much broader amount of information (eg the accuracy of the data), using a mixture of multidiscipline teams and computer models. We asked him to explain his idea e have developed a new method that enables drilling decision makers to input all data, geoscience, engineering, procurement, economic into a single computer model to work out drilling risk, working out the expected value, adjusted for risk, of each prospect, and ultimately to maximise investor returns. Normally, oil and gas companies evaluate drilling options using Monte Carlo simulations, running a statistical model of the opportunity. The problem is that these models are expensive, cumbersome and are limited in the data sets and subjective input into the model. We are proposing an alternative method which takes all the available information into account, enables engineers and geologists / geophysicists to work together and continually assess each other´s data, doing the process iteratively until it is as good as possible, and using a computer to determine the best options taking everything into account. The knowledge processes involved include management integration, project scope, time, cost, quality, human resources, communications, risk and procurement.

W

Optimality Optimality can be defined as the best that could be achieved without disadvantaging at least one group. Any given oilfield operation involves integrating a number of geoscience, engineering, economic, financial, and managerial criteria into the decisionmaking process. The economic utility or overall level of satisfaction (value) attained in this decision-making process is a function of the optimization of all variables not just the maximization of one or few. No single variable in the decision-making process is maximized but overall, the expected return for the project is optimal (maximised).

The process The first step is to form the project team and identify which disciplines will be involved and who will be accountable in each team. The engineering and geophysical / geological team work in parallel. The next step is to try to validate / improve the available data as much as possible, and identify unknowns and gaps. The engineering team, working together with the service company and other data sources, can provide information about wells drilled in the basin already (such as drilling reports, hole problems, mud weight information, lost circulation) which can be validated by the geophysical / geological team, which can put together a new seismic earth model. The engineering team can work out the pore

10

digital energy journal - September 2006

pressures and fracture gradients, and the geological / geophysical team can draw maps and cross sections of the field geological picture. All the information can be collated and the process can go through iteration loops until it is as good as possible. The third step is a more robust decision model which includes procurement, regulatory compliance issues, and greater detailed engineering (often including input from the service companies). The geological and geophysical team can do additional data refinement using mud logs, make predictions about leak paths and oil trapping mechanisms, and can talk to other experts about the strength of assumptions. The engineering team can work out how confident it is in finding oil in the locations chosen, and work out contingency plans. It can validate costs and put together a draft drilling program. Both teams can do a final review to verify all data and decide how reliable it is, what is known and what isn´t known. If necessary, the entire process can go through more iterations. Meanwhile necessary purchases and personnel plans can be submitted for approval. At this point it will be possible for management to decide if the project can go ahead.

A computer model Once this process has been documented and decision feedback loops determined, it can be modeled using a Structural Dynamics based inference engine.

The solution enables engineers, management and geoscientists to manage a large amount of data and variables in a single model of the entire process. The models are very robust and some have been run using a million nodes, although most applications only require a hundred or so. The inference engine runs a series of iterations with feedback loops that drive a large set of variables to convergence or the optimal solution. A typical inference engine control panel would control the workflow and data input of the overall process. It would include the ability for management ot override based on an individual or group of individuals knowledge. In the preliminary risk assessment (stage one), the inputs would be: Outside issues: the impact of organisation process assets; the impact of external factors Selection criteria: if the well is shallow, intermediate or HTHP, the level of confidence in the model From other processes: the quality of definition of the project scope statement; the availability of project resources; the capabilities of project resources; the quality of the project management plan From the earth model: the number of offset wells; the quality of horizon maps; From the engineering model: the number of other basin wells; the quality of other data. Ratings of the service companies involved can be input, also if the project is on schedule, or early / late. In stage two, the final drilling risk assessment:

About the Author Strategic Decision Sciences, Inc. provides its clients with tailored strategic behavioral economics based programs designed to provide organizational flexibility, rapid operational response, and culture adaptability. The firm’s clients include Fortune 500 global firms, non-profit organizations, as well as mid-size companies faced with the need to swiftly transform when confronted by global business dynamics. The firm has been addressing business process optimization with integrated knowledge management systems for Fortune 500 firms. The majority of this effort has focused on difficult problems faced by large global industries such as energy and telecommunications with Decision Support Solutions. Dr. Scott Shemwell has been using process simulation techniques to solve complex integrated problems since the early 1990s. He has also used this technique to assure the performance of online real-time process control systems evaluating possible failure/consequence scenarios. Dr. Scott M. Shemwell 281-414-6958 [email protected] www.StrategicDecisionSciences.com

Software Inputs can include: Quality of assumptions for drilling, contingencies, cost of additional data, HES For human resources: the availability and capability of people, and their confidence in the drilling option The various well options can be evaluated for whether the G and G assumptions need refining; if cost criteria are met; if the drilling assumptions have been validated; how good the drilling practises are; how good the engineering assumptions are. The computer can crunch the information and determine the quality of the preliminary and final risk assessments, the level of confidence in the final model, how good the different drilling options are, which is the preferred service company and ultimately the level of project risk. Finally, the output can feed to executive dashboards, adding a level to field intelligence that typical solutions, including those with Monte Carlo simulation, cannot emulate. The output will include a number of scenar-

ios from which management can selection implementation plans.

Business intelligence Business Intelligence (BI) is beginning to take on the mantel of Field Intelligence, recognizing that revenue generation and direct costs are the major variables in any upstream operator. To-date, management dashboards are fairly simplistic, far short of providing executives with the tools necessary to run the revenue producing asset and the enterprise at optimal levels. This is the beginning of real analytic and decision support power—the optimal solution that decision makers from the field to the board room can use to attain competitive advantage. This approach towards asset utilization is grounded in economics and capitalizes on the proven portfolio management techniques to realize significant value to the firm. Inference engines when tasked to specific processes offer high value propositions and will help firms realize the potential of digital energy. These tools and techniques are forming the

basis for true lean energy management which is the next great step towards maximizing shareholder value. The promise of lean is not just anointed on those with deep pockets, value will be earned using sophisticated decision-support models such as described herein. One has only to look at other industry sectors who have employed lean techniques such as statistical process control to see who the winners and losers are. This type of solution has been used in other industries with great success and it is now poised to do the same for upstream oil and gas. For example, one recent simulated scenario saved a refinery almost 18% during an upgrade process. The value is documented and it is substantial. A similar scenario is possible for the upstream sectors as it embarks on the digital path. The future will belong to the bold and innovative, just like it always has in the oil and gas industry.

Roxar buys Energy Scitech Reservoir modelling software company Roxar has acquired Energy Scitech, a UK consultancy and software development house. Energy Scitech agreed to the acquisition because it felt it needed the support of a larger company with complementary technology to continue to grow. Energy Scitech´s flagship product is EnABLE, a software tool for history matching and reservoir uncertainty estimation, which Roxar believes is the best on the market. It is used to understand and measure uncertainty in reservoir production performance predictions, and to optimise production plans. Roxar customers will be able to use EnABLE together with Roxar´s reservoir modelling tool IRAP RMS

and reservoir simulation tool Tempest. With all the tools working together, customers will be able to examine numerous geological scenarios, create simulation models and work out how likely the oil will flow as predicted. This is the first acquisition Roxar has made since it was acquired by investment company Arcapita Bank earlier this year. "This deal confirms that Roxar and our owners, Arcapita, are prepared to make the necessary investments to further reinforce our leadership position in our markets," says Roxar. Energy Scitech also provides services with field development planning and asset valuation.

Roxar's reservoir modelling tool IRAP will work together with EnABLE software for history matching and reservoir uncertainty estimation

www.roxar.com

Petris buys Maurer Technology software Oil and gas data management software company Petris has bought the software and support assets of the Maurer Technology drilling and completion software, previously owned by Noble Technology Services. The software is used to plan and execute drilling and completion programs. This includes well planning, engineering studies, analysis, reporting and troubleshooting problems

before they become critical. Clients can design wellbore trajectories, design and verify casing strings, minimise casing wear, design cement jobs, analyse torque and drag, verify wellbore hydraulics, plan for well control, determine pore and fracture pressures, determine wellbore stability and numerous programs for coiled tubing design and completion programs. There are 18 separate software programs in the software suite.

The software has been carefully designed so it can be mastered by new users very quickly, Petris says. Petris will take responsibility for development, sales, service and development of the software, which will continue to be produced under the Maurer name. Petris has previously offered the software as a web hosted tool under its 'applications on demand' service PetrisWINDS Now. It should now become easier for

users of Maurer software to integrate it with other software applications they are using, using the PetrisWINDS Enterprise technology integration system. "We see a great future for this combination, with a positive outlook for the drilling and completion market," says Petris. www.petris.com

September 2006 - digital energy journal

11

Software

When suppliers use e-purchasing to buy Dave Wallis

Bill le Sage

Oil and gas suppliers are getting used to using e-commerce in their dealings with oil and gas companies; they are only now starting to think about using it for their own purchasing. They probably need to go about this in a different way than they did for selling electronically. By Dave Wallis, European representative, and Bill LeSage, CEO, of OFS Portal or the last five years, the focus of e-commerce for upstream oil and gas service suppliers has been on the sell side; exchanging documents with oil compa-

F

nies. The adoption and adherence to PIDX standards has been instrumental in driving the success of document exchange between operators and service suppliers from both a technology and business process perspective. The service suppliers are now beginning to focus on their buy side processes as well. Although PIDX has enabled success within the upstream oil and gas vertical, service suppliers cannot rely on PIDX standards to address all the complexities that will be faced by the buying organisation. Before embarking on a buy side electronic document exchange program a service company should consider an integrated organisational approach and flexibility in both technology and business processes in order to communicate with a variety of trading partners in a number of industries. Although the focus of internet based data exchange for service suppliers in upstream oil and gas has been managing the process of selling to operating companies, buy side data exchange promises to be as important for saving money and driving efficiency for service companies. Though many of the lessons learned from building a sell side document exchange organisation are applicable to the buy side, there are three key differences, related to the service company organisation, the IT technology and industry business processes that should be considered when expanding a sell side document exchange business to the buy side. Although buy side and sell side programs may use different applications and different business processes to communicate with trading partners, the basic IT infrastructure will be the same. This basic infrastructure includes the networking infrastructure, the applications that sit behind a company’s firewall, as well as the staff and procedures to maintain this infrastructure. In addition to infrastructure, the internet domain knowledge that is required is similar whether buying or selling. Security requirements tend to be the same, and while documents and data exchange protocols may be different, they are more variations on a theme than new concepts. The project management methodology is common, and at the highest level, the business

12

digital energy journal - September 2006

processes are also similar. For example, both the buy side and sell side will have a purchase order process and an invoicing process, even though the details of these processes might be very different. Even though the sell side and buy side of ecommerce is different for upstream oil and gas services suppliers, there are significant commonalities that give a company with an established sell side practice a head start on creating a buy side practice.

Organisation The first major differentiation point between sell side and buy side e-commerce is organisational. Key company stakeholders are very different between buying and selling, and these stakeholders also have different roles in the company, different criteria for success and require different business cases to initiate projects. On the sell side, the key business stakeholders tend to be the account management teams, who focus on customer service and tend to view ecommerce as a way of enhancing service to the customer. On the buy side, the key stakeholders tend to be in procurement and finance, and their emphasis is on using technology and business process changes to save money. Since the direct financial benefits of e-commerce tend to be realized by the buyer in the relationship, buyers usually pro-actively push e-commerce, while sellers react to the requirements of their customers. While there are benefits to sell side e-commerce, they tend to be difficult to measure; such things as increasing the chance of maintaining current customers, increasing the chance of winning new business and better general customer satisfaction. Therefore, the first consideration when beginning a buy side e-commerce program is to recognize the different organisational priorities and to structure the buy side program accordingly.

Changes in business process The second major point of differentiation between sell side and buy side e-commerce is business process related. While there are subtle differences between the preferred process for each oil company, the upstream oil and gas industry as a whole works though the Petroleum Industry Data Exchange (PIDX) committee of the American Petroleum Institute to help standardize the business processes.

Standardisation around PIDX in upstream oil and gas has been very effective and thus virtually all integrated purchases use the PIDX standard. In part this is because most of the direct buying done by the oil companies are purchases from upstream oil and gas service companies – direct purchases within the industry vertical. When service companies buy, a much larger percentage of direct spend is from companies outside of upstream oil and gas industry, like steel, chemical and machine shop companies. Thus for the buy side of service companies, there is no standards body that encompasses this wide range of industries from which service suppliers purchase and it is much more difficult to settle on a single standard. In addition to the differences between buying direct goods and services, the other difference between oil company and service company purchases is the nature of the purchase itself. Most direct purchases from oil companies are for non-explicit buys from a service company; whereas the majority of direct buys executed by a service company involve explicit purchases. A non-explicit buy is one in which the details of the transaction are not specifically known at the time of purchase. Given this background, one can see that it is not even possible to establish a single business process for the wide variety of businesses a service company buys from. Therefore, the second consideration when beginning a buy side e-commerce program is to recognize that while the sell side is able to benefit from a single standard, the buy side requires a number of additional standards to achieve the flexibility necessary to handle a variety of business processes.

Changes in technology The third major point of differentiation between sell side and buy side e-commerce is information technology (IT) related. For sell side e-commerce for upstream oil and gas service companies, there are a small number of relatively large trading partners with which to exchange documents. Each buyer tends to be well advanced in IT systems and represents a large number of documents, and each document can represent a large financial transaction. For these reasons, the bias on the sell side is for a technology that is extremely automated and robust. On the buy side, there are also large companies with high transaction counts, but is important to

Software be able to connect with smaller companies because they represent a larger percentage of the business. For these smaller companies, the bias is towards an easy to implement technology, that is cheaper to implement, but does not have to be as robust. Often, the IT systems of buy side trading partners cannot even support integrated connections, so manual steps are often acceptable on the buy side, where they would not be on the sell side. To connect to these smaller, non-integrated trading partners, some type of ‘manual’ web form or file upload capability may be more practical alternatives. There is also a standardisation aspect to the technology. Since document exchange for the sell side of service companies is based on the PIDX standards, it is possible to be able to manage the entire sell side e-commerce program with a single technology (Rosettanet Integration Framework (RNIF) for example.) Although PIDX standards are mature and work very well on the sell side of service companies; on the buy side, because of multiple standards, and the complexity of RNIF, it is also necessary to support additional integrated protocols. A good additional protocol to use is AS2, which is both a PIDX recommended protocol, and has wide cross industry acceptance. The third consideration when beginning a buy side e-commerce program is to recognize the

additional IT software, to handle varied connectivity protocols as well as manual connections and integration across industries will be necessary to connect to a wide variety of trading partners.

Managing an integrated organisation Although there are significant differences in requirements between sell side and buy side ecommerce for the upstream oil and gas services supplier, there are enough common aspects that they should be managed by a single organisation. The primary challenge in managing this integrated organisation is in balancing the different priorities of the buy side and sell side business stakeholders, while being able to take advantage of shared knowledge and infrastructure to be able to scale the organisation. Establishing an objective measure for comparing projects with different business owners is the best way to balance priorities, while establishing best practices for integration project management and document libraries is necessary to be able to take advantage of shared knowledge and scale the organisation. Experience has shown that to achieve overall program success it is necessary to have C-level program sponsorship, preferably from an executive with responsibility over both the sales and procurement organisations. When a service company initiates a buy side ecommerce program, the company should establish a plan for managing an integrated IT organisation which serves both the buy side and the sell side.

EDS develops oil and gas IT outsourcing services Global IT giant EDS is promoting IT outsourcing services to the oil and gas industry. "IT outsourcing of infrastructure related components is increasing within this industry," says David Smith, head of portfolio energy industry frameworks for the oil and gas sector, at EDS. "Global oil and gas organizations need a robust, secure and flexible IT capability to help them capture, analyze, communicate and apply the information needed for effective decision making." A major trend is 'applications outsourcing,' enabling a company to run its software applications over a single network, rather than over many different networks in different locations. This can be cheaper to run and enable business processes to be streamlined and standardised across the company, he says.

Oil and gas copmanies keep business components which reflect their core business competences in house, such as technical computing, upstream applications, engineering, non-standard software applications, asset management and work management applications. Software applications which are likely to be outsourced include "corporate systems like financial services, human resources and supporting applications, like document management," he says. Oil and gas companies should choose EDS because it can rapidly put in place IT components globally, and provide outsourced financial servies, human resources, procurement and logistics services, he suggests. www.eds.com

OFS Portal is a group of diverse suppliers working together with a non-profit objective to provide standardized electronic information to B2B trading partners to facilitate e-commerce in the upstream oil and gas industry. Members include Baker Hughes, BJ Services, Cameron, FMC Technologies, Greene Tweed & Co., Halliburton, M-I SWACO, Schlumberger, Smith International,Trican, Vetco Gray, and Weatherford.

Wellogix PIDX invoices for smaller companies Houston oil and gas purchasing and payment systems company Wellogix has deployed its PIDX Small Business Adapter, which enables small to medium sized oilfield service companies to put together a PIDX compliant invoice process, much more cheaply and quickly than they otherwise could. Using the adapter, service providers can create invoices in PIDX XML format straight out of their accounting software. They can put the process together in ´minutes´ at a cost of ´less than a thousand dollars,´ the company says. They can import them into their Wellogix Complex Services Management Suite (CSMsm), which checks the security, reliability of the content and the receipt. No data rekeying is required. "Previously, PIDX integrations

were the realm of large service providers, costing thousands of dollars and taking weeks, sometimes months, to complete," the company says. The first company to install the system was SOA Pump and Supply, which installed it in order to meet requests for electronic invoices from customers without having to rekey invoice data and without having to hire additional personnel. After using the adapter for three months, SOA says it has seen a reduction of 20 days in its Day’s Sales Outstanding. www.wellogix.com

September 2006 - digital energy journal

13

Software

Structuring oil and gas information Ulysses Systems makes systems which structure information and co-ordinate activities in the oil tanker industry, both on ship and shore. Could the concept work in the oil and gas industry? here has been plenty of talk in the oil and gas industry about the problems of having too much unstructured information. Information is not provided to the right people at the right time; people do not learn from the experiences of other people doing the same task elsewhere in the company; and it is very hard, or maybe even impossible, to find out why certain decisions were made in the past. Most people agree that efficiencies and safety improvements could be made if people could coordinate their work better. The challenge is how to set about making a software program that can co-ordinate people’s activities and store the relevant information as people go along, without creating additional work for people. UK software company Ulysses Systems has got close to creating a solution for the commercial maritime industry, where its software is being used onboard around 1,000 oil tankers, offshore support vessels and other vessels; it is now seeking business opportunities in the oil and gas industry. 50 shipping companies are using the software, twice as many customers as it had 18 months ago. It recently signed up French marine services giant Bourbon Offshore, which is using the software onboard its 130 vessels, including 7 multipurpose supply vessels, 21 anchor handling tug supply vessels, 22 platform supply vessels, 3 terminal tugs, 8 fast support and intervention vessels, and 11 crew boats. Bourbon purchased the software, Ulysses says, as a means of co-ordinating and consolidating all of its corporate communications plus maintenance, purchasing, crewing and document coordination, and because it thought it was the easiest to use. The information is structured around company activities, as defined by the Bourbon employees.

T

Ulysses’ solution Ulysses solution is about designing ‘activity models’, creating software which can be used to coordinate regularly completed tasks and store the information about them, so it can be accessed immediately in other parts of the company, and kept as a record for the future. Ulysses does not try to drag people away from their spreadsheets and e-mails; but all emails and spreadsheets are automatically indexed so that they can easily be accessed at a later date.

14

digital energy journal - September 2006

Activity models can be built for any task people commonly refer to; the tasks can be relatively predictable, like a planned maintenance task, or relatively complex and as yet unpredictable, like bringing in experts around the world to try to explain a drop in production. To date, Ulysses has built software modules to manage tasks and information flow related to maintenance, purchasing, crew management and documentation. The software system is not so rigid that it requires that staff standardise their business processes; they just need common reference points. The software is possibly best suited for business processes which are prone to failure or unexpected success, because they can easily record the reasons failures happened or successes happened, so the organisation can learn from them. So, for example, if a company wants to find out why boiler controls were changed 5 years ago, all the communications and documents related to this decision will be automatically stored and can be retrieved by their relationship to current concerns. If there is an occurrence the software system can retrieve structured information about everything which was relevant to the occurrence as well as how it was remedied. This requires no special reporting or indexing by users so information collects in the system from which subsequent users can learn so as to avoid the same occurrence. The software can provide information to users, taken from other parts of the system, about what they are currently doing. The relationships between activities can change continuously and the system can be set up to adapt to the changes. If staff members like to use e-mails and spreadsheets, they are automatically indexed. When individuals log onto their computers every day, they see a list of tasks outstanding, which need their attention. When they click on them, the software provides ready information they need. The software can also provide rapid access to information which might be needed when specific tasks are being performed. Ulysses stresses that this is not calling its software ‘knowledge management’ software, which operates in a very different way, normally requiring people to type in their experiences into the system, rather than indexing the information they

Dimitris Lyras, advisor, Ulysses Systems. “Knowledge management should be built around activity models”

create anyway. Ulysses believes that activity co-ordination software such as this is most suitable for work environments which have a small group of employees doing many different tasks but doing the same processes repeatedly (eg corporate communications co-ordination and purchasing, maintenance, crew management), where there is critical issues which justify the software investment (eg high risk / high liability, expensive assets, regulatory requirements.

Examples Here are some specific examples of how activity co-ordination software can work. One offshore vessel master told of an oil rig captain who asked the vessel to accept drums of chemicals, but refused to disclose what the specific chemical was, on the grounds that the vessel operator had signed a contract that it would accept all deliveries from the rig. The vessel master needed rapid access to company policy information, to tell him what to do in such a circumstance, whether to accept the drums or not, which the Ulysses Systems software could make available. Another example is purchasing. If someone needs to make a purchase, the software can be configured to have information readily available about the last time similar items were bought in the company, if the items were actually used (or are sitting in storage somewhere), who the supplier was, what the price was, and how well the product performed. Another example, taken from the maritime industry, is of a ship with two ballast systems, one of which is suddenly not operable and the other with a hidden defect that could only become relevant under certain circumstance. The engineer knows that he can pump the ballast in twice as much time (half speed), so the vessel does not need to be taken out of service. However this means that the second pump needs to pump and also to purge the tanks at full capacity which it may well not be able to do and while this may have been its condition for a long time it now becomes highly relevant to the safety of the vessel. If ballast is being pumped out and cargo is being loaded simultaneously, the minute by minute loading characteristics of the vessel will change with just one ballast pump, which could lead to the vessel being overloaded at certain points or dangerously strained or touching bot-

Software staff might not know what they are looking for because they are not aware of its existence. For example, in the case above with the ballast pump, the chief officer would not necessarily search for documents to find out if the second working pump had a defect which prevented it from being able to pump tanks at full capacity – this needs a system to ‘push’ the information rather than wait for someone to go out and find it.

Text search vs structured information

Ships have high demands for knowledge management systems, with a small number of crewmembers doing many different tasks, with safety implications if they are not completed. Would shipping company software be useful in the oil and gas industry?

tom during loading. A structured software system such as Ulysses can relate the process of planning the loading with the process of running all the related machinery and can highlight potential hidden problems in the machinery that may not come to notice until its too late. A further example of typical problems with e-mail systems is a document which belongs in three different folders because it is related to three different issues. Using a Microsoft Office type system,

the user has to save it three times, and then might find that one version is being updated and the other isn’t, causing all kinds of problems. With a more structured software system, the document is only saved once, but the system is set up so people can assess it when they need it for the three different issues it relates to. It might be possible to access all of this information by searching through company intranets, but it would take a lot longer, filtering through lots of poor matches; there is also the problem that

PICK UP A COPY IQPC Oil and gas Exchange November 13-14, London PETEX - November 21-23 London SIGN UP ON www.digitalenergyjournal.com to receive a free copy of our next issue

Most people are comfortable doing text-based searches, both on their own PCs and on internet search engines, and have a good knowledge about the type of information that can be retrieved easily with this kind of search. Most of us are even very reliant on text based searches to find all the information we think we need – for example, searching for someone’s phone number on the internet using Google, rather than writing it in our phone directory. What is not so readily understood is how much a structured data system can help provide the right information when people need it. On a system like the one Ulysses develops, since all information created during work is automatically indexed as it is created; there is no need to file or label anything, and there is no vital information on people’s personal PCs, or lost in their email systems. “Outlook is not an information management system,” says Mr Lyras. “It is a linear messaging system. It is not even a shared document system. “Even shared document systems on the market have no model of what people discuss and do in the company.– So the system cannot help manage its own content within the pattern of the organisation. Ours is a whole different way of looking at how you manage the information. It’s a revolution in how you hold information. That’s much closer to how people classify information in their own mind.”

NEXT ISSUE Coming up in our November issue Defining and using 'real time data' Integrating geology and engineering Report from Schlumberger's 2006 Forum in Paris Fibre optics inside wells

Software

Premium Drilling signs to SpecTec Premium Drilling, an operator of 16 jack-up rigs, has signed up to use maintenance and spares management software by SpecTec, a company which produces software which is used onboard 6,000 deep sea vessels.

remium´s sister company Premium Offshore has also signed up to use the software to manage maintenance and spares onboard onboard 4 Floating, Production, Storage and Offloading vessels (FPSOs). SpecTec´s biggest oil and gas client is Saipem, the world’s largest offshore services supplier, which signed a deal 10-15 years ago to use the software onboard oil rigs and barges. SpecTec also has a strong penetration within Italian oil company ENI, and oil company Agip Libya. Several oil and gas companies are using the software for planned maintenance and condition maintenance, monitoring temperature, vibration and pressure.

P

For limited data connectivity SpecTec´s software is specifically designed for applications where there is limited data connectivity between remote computers and headquarters. Many rig operators are finding that even fast always on VSAT connections struggle to run maintenance software which has been designed for land applications where data connectivity is not an issue, such as SAP and Microsoft Navision. Often with VSAT communications from rigs, software communication is queued up behind voice and videoconferencing, so there is no instant connectivity with the main database, which confuses the software. SpecTec´s software does not have any of these problems, because it was specifically designed for use on ships, where the shipboard computer communicates with the headquarters computer briefly twice a day, but the headquarters still needs to know what is going on. All of the data is labelled; so the computer system always knows which piece of data has been changed in which database, so the necessary updates can be made during the database replication. So, for example, a large cruise ship operator, which has 1.45 million spare parts in circulation, has 1.45m ID codes (known as ‘primary keys’). “The trick is to be able to create separate primary keys for databases which then need to share information, so that, for instance, spares or compo-

16

digital energy journal - September 2006

nents can be moved from one rig to the other, or from a stock room ashore to a rig,” says Giampiero Soncini, president of SpecTec. “It is easy to do when you deal with one database located centrally, with all remote computers linked via cable. But when you try to do so in scattered locations such as rigs, well, you soon find out the difference between one software and another.” If the same piece of data is changed in two different locations, then business rules are written to determine what should be done. This is something which cannot be achieved using software applications designed for shore industries, such as SAP or Microsoft Navision.

“I try to convince customers, you need the best combination of planned maintenance and condition maintenance,” says Mr Soncini. “But where SpecTec is going to go full force, is towards reliability centered maintenance and risk analysis. This is what the customer advisory board advice has been, and this we are already doing” Condition maintenance Many SpecTec customers are starting to look at condition monitoring systems, using, for example, vibration data to check on the condition of equipment as a supplement to the normal planed maintenance. SpecTec’s standard approach to condition monitoring is to set things up so you receive continuous information about one item (eg vibration

Giampiero Soncini, president of SpecTec "providing the best combination of planned and condition maintenance - Giampiero.."

of an Electric Motor) and get an alert if the reading changes. “I try to convince customers, you need the best combination of planned maintenance and condition maintenance,” says Mr Soncini. “But where SpecTec is going to go full force, is towards reliability centered maintenance and risk analysis. This is what the customer advisory board advice has been, and this we are already doing”

New offices SpecTec has recently opened offices in Shanghai, Greece, Dubai, Germany and Ukraine. It plans to expand in former Soviet countries, with a new office planned in Moscow in addition to the already existing one in St Petersburg, and possibly in South America where it is represented only by one agent. The company is also planning to reinforce its operations in Asia. SpecTec’s strength, Mr. Soncini believes, is in the size of its international network, which allows it to provide a software engineer or consultant at short notice at any major maritime or offshore centre, with an intimate knowledge of both the shipping / offshore industry and of the software. Software development is handled in Norway and Cyprus, and is currently opening new, fully owned, product development offices in Ukraine and the Middle East.

AMOS2 The company has started developing and rolling out the next generation of its software, AMOS2, which will work in a different way, pushing information which users need out to them, rather than requiring them continually to go into the software to find what they need. “The system recognises you,” says Mr Soncini. “The usability of the software is different, yet it will look familiar to our users.” The first 200 ships will go live using the software in September / October this year. The development of Amos2 will be driven by the Customer Advisory Board. It is an upgrade to Amos, but will take into consideration more than 300 suggestions received by the customers. www.spectec.net

Software

Hosting your data remotely Aberdeen company Digital Energy Exchange offers a service to host data remotely, so companies can share large files without going behind each other’s firewalls. We interviewed managing director Sam Gomersall

berdeen company Digital Energy Exchange offers services to remotely host data, so that it is easier to share it between different companies, without the complications of one company having to go behind another’s firewall. The company has been in business for since early 2005, and is currently completing its development work and is in a business development phase, seeking further discussions with oil and gas companies to discuss take-up of the service. The service is currently set up for managing files which are too large to comfortably manage with e-mail. It can be used for sharing documents, collaborating with third companies, or obtaining material from third parties. The service can be accessed over the internet or over the Secure Oilfield Information Link (SOIL) operated by OilCamp, a secure communications network. Companies can set things up so they access the data via a ‘mapped network drive’ on their PCs - ie drive C is your hard drive, drive D is the CD ROM, and drive E is the Digital Energy Exchange network drive. Users do not have to bother themselves with making sure they have sufficient data storage capacity and they are backing up the data, or managing secure access for everyone they want to provide access to the data to. The system is possibly more suited to smaller oil and gas operators, which tend to have more complex external networks, with many companies sharing data with each other, as opposed to a simpler scenario where a small service provider wants to share data with a mother international oil company. Applications could include sharing seismic data, so that the owner of the data, and seismic survey company and third party companies which are interpreting it, can access it. “If there’s material to be input by the provider and interpreted by the third party it makes sense to have it in a common place they can all get access to it,” says Mr Gomersall. The next level of development will be updating the system to handle real time data. This is more complex (because it is a data stream, rather than a data storage issue). DEEX is also planning to offer services to host software. The service was established by three Aberdeen companies, Fast Frog, Suretec Systems and YR20. The company works closely with British Telecom (BT), sharing capabilities and expertise in

A

this area. Users can have a pay as you go fee of 20 MB transferred (£5 per month minimum). Or they can take various contract pricing schemes (eg £200 / month to transfer up to 10 gb). There are no registration or setup fees. Logs are kept of all file transfers and revisions so there is a full audit trail. E-mails and text messages can be sent to recipients notifying that a transfer has taken place. Documents can be encrypted during transfer if necessary. People raise security concerns about storing the data with a third party rather than store it themselves, but Mr Gomersall believes that storing it with a third party can actually be more secure, because it can be transferred from one person to another without printing it out or using insecure

“Normally the company that’s highest in the food chain - says - do it in my server, that’s eventually what happens,” he says. “But if all the service companies would do this they would need a different system for every oil major they work with.” “Is the long term future for us to store data in our buildings?” he asks. e-mail to transfer it. Access to the data is controlled by password, but could be further secured by smart card system if more security is needed. On the DEEX system, for each document it is possible to specify who should be able to see it, and even when the document expires, so you can make sure everyone is using the same version. However Mr Gomersall admits that there are big cultural problems to be overcome before companies start storing their data externally on a large scale. “There is all this castle-type IT mentality,” he says.

Sam Gomersall, Managing Director, Digital Energy Exchange

More third party storage? Managing director Sam Gomersall, himself a petroleum engineer, believes that the industry should be questioning a lot more whether it should store all of its data within its own computer system or use neutral third party storage, and he is keen to ignite the debate. “Normally the company that’s highest in the food chain - says - do it in my server, that’s eventually what happens,” he says. “But if all the service companies would do this they would need a different system for every oil major they work with.” “Is the long term future for us to store data in our buildings?” he asks. Mr Gomersall believes that the Google vs Microsoft discussion is similar -with users having the option, for certain products, of having Google web hosted services or Microsoft software running on their own PCs. “In the long term - the management of data, and the collaboration of using that data will be better served by having it on a third party server,” he believes. www.deex.com

September 2006 - digital energy journal

17

Software

Marise Mikulis, Microsoft Marise Mikulis, worldwide oil and gas industry manager with Microsoft Corporation, speaking at the IQPC Future Fields conference in Amsterdam in June, said that a lot of her passion is about accelerating adoption of software tools in the oil and gas industry.

ommonly the sense is, it's not happening fast enough. How do we help accelerate the adoption?," she said.

C

Ms Mikulis has been in the oil and gas industry for 20 years. She was previously chief marketing officer for Upstreaminfo, which supplies asset management systems to the oil and gas industry. Before that she was with Petroleum Geo-Services, POSC, Digital Equipment Corp and Superior Oil Company. "I want to be provocative - bring in ideas you may not have seen before," said Marise Mikulis, worldwide oil and gas industry manager for Microsoft, speaking at IQPC'sFuture Fields conference in Amsterdam in June. Ms Mikulis said that many oil and gas companies have got a lot further with installing 'smart' technology in individual wells, than they have for the reservoir (integrated operations). Putting the question to conference delegates, nobody in the room said they had optimised their entire reservoirs, but many delegates thought they had made progress on individual technology and subsystems. The biggest challenge is persuading colleagues to get more enthusiastic about technology, she said. "We need a lot more confidence and trust. "The soft stuff is the hard (difficult) stuff. We need people willing to take the leap." Microsoft has a big advertising campaign called 'people ready,' stressing the user friendliness of the software. "That's the core of what we're trying to do," she said. "Corporations don't do the work, people do," she said. However Ms Mikulis noted that new younger employees are likely to have a very different attitude. "A lot of new people coming into the industry have a whole different set of boundaries about sharing, what information has to be kept confidential and what doesn't," she said. On the topic of workflows, Ms Mikulis said that the topic is "bubbling up more prominently now." There is a gradual shift from a dashboard / portal model for software (where you have all the information available on a screen) to workflow software, where the software tells each user what specific task they have to do. "Advancing that I think is quite key," she said. Ms Mikulis talked about some of the world changes mentioned in Thomas Friedman's book 'The World is Flat,' because it could be some comfort to oil industry executives to know that the rest

18

digital energy journal - September 2006

of the world is going through the same turmoil as they are. "When we talk to colleagues about what we're trying to do, it's important that they see this is not a spurious activity," she said. "People have to understand, things have changed while they were looking for oil and gas." The book talks about three things all happening at the same time which are forcing enormous change to all industries. These are new ways of doing business, new populations of workers, and new technologies. The relationships between companies and suppliers worldwide is changing, as echoed in the changing relationships between national oil companies, international oil companies and suppliers. "We can do business in new ways," she said. "This is the most important force in shaping global economics and politics." Ms Mikulis said that most people have an opinion, positive or negative, about POSC (Petrotechnical Open Standards Consortium), a

"A lot of new people coming into the industry have a whole different set of boundaries about sharing, what information has to be kept confidential and what doesn't," body which develops electronic communications standards for upstream oil and gas. "There is so much scepticism, so many bruises out there, so many failed projects," she said. Ms Mikulis talked about the audience vote held at the Intelligent Energy 2006 conference in Amsterdam, about how reliable delegates thought intelligent completions were, with most present saying they thought they were around 50 per cent reliable. This is clearly an inhibitor to further development of the technology. "There have been some big successes. We have to make sure our colleagues are hearing about them. Our assumptions of vulnerability are not always well founded," she said. "If our colleagues don't think this can be done, they're not going to do it."

"On one hand, perception is reality for our colleagues. But we need to uncover the facts to shift these perceptions. "We need to think about where reliability is and isn't. You have operations reliability, project reliability, user reliability and privacy reliability. There are a number of aspects of reliability that are getting attention." "Certain parts are reliable, like control systems. There is a perception that communications systems and IT infrastructure have questionable reliability." Ms Mikulis raised the issue of using software to improve the reliability of project management. "We know how much money this industry spends on capital projects," she said. "You can manage projects better if you have more information available. We call it project intelligence." One way to improve project intelligence would be to bring in digital oilfield technologies much earlier in the exploration and well development efforts. "The broader the base of the information you can get, the better chance you have of managing it well," she said. Ms Mikulis raised the issue of using computer game-type tools for training, perhaps enabling the oil and gas industry to draw on Microsoft's expertise building the X-Box. "Computer games are no longer a sub culture," she said. "The average 8th grader plays video games over 5 hours per week." "The Federation of American Scientists (FAS) is producing new learning tools with gaming techniques, that are more usable and attractive," she said. "These tools are highly motivating and can be more impactful in making sure learning gets through. This helps accelerate the depth of expertise. It has the potential to teach complex, higher order skills." FAS is doing similar work for the US Department of Defence and medical industry, she said. On the subject of security, Ms Mikulis talked about digital rights management, which is included in standard Microsoft Office software. You can define who can read a document, who can forward it, and how long it lasts for (so access is automatically denied after a certain time). This is a useful tool to make sure that out of date documents are expired and everybody is using the right version.

Communications and Monitoring RigNet ties real time data tool to satcoms RigNet Inc has signed a marketing agreement with Sense Intellifield to market, sell and support its ‘SiteCom’ real time data management products. This means that RigNet will be selling Sense Intellifield’s real time data management products together with its oil rig satellite communications services. The SiteCom software can be used to automate data manipulation and management tasks associated with real time data, as well as convert the data so vendors can be WITSML compliant. ““SiteCom is the recognized stan-

dard in the industry for real-time data management based on WITSML,” says RigNet.”Our agreement with Sense Intellifield allows us to be the only independent singlesource solution that links multiple drilling rigs with real-time onshore decision centres and applications. “Our services now include the complete communications package of voice, video, networking, and realtime data management.” These services are available to link any data source offshore with any client system onshore through the standard WITSML format.”

The data is transmitted to a web server in Trondheim using Inmarsat satellite communications, and then shown on a dedicated web page for the vessels working on the project. Knowledge of the situation is

Oil and gas information company IHS Energy has sold its iNodes wireless sensors range to oilfield equipment manufacturer Ferguson Beauregard of Tyler, Texas. IHS is selling iNodes because it feels that providing and supporting oilfield monitoring equipment is not part of the company´s core competency, which is delivering critical information to customers. “We believe a better way to widely implement these innovative products and provide value to our customers is to sell the technology to a

company like Ferguson Beauregard, which specializes in the manufacturing and field service of oilfield equipment and automation,” IHS says. IHS launched iNodes in 2004, to gather data automatically in the field, so that it would not have to be all entered by hand. It was intended as an extension to its FieldDIRECT services which use handheld personal digital assistants (PDAs) to transmit daily production data from the field to a remote hosting centre. www.ihsenergy.com

www.rig.net

Ormen Lange wave data for Norsk Hydro over Inmarsat Meterological data company Fugro GEOS has been contracted by Norske Hydro to set up a system to provide real time data about wind, waves and currents in the Ormen Lange oilfield in the Norwegian Sea.

IHS sells iNodes wireless sensors to Ferguson Beauregard

vital for construction work on the gas field and associated pipeline, due to the powerful and unpredictable environmental conditions in this area. Fugro GEOS has been providing measurement services into a data logger since 2001, but now the data will be sent back to shore. The data is collected from three locations along the Ormen Lange pipeline route. www.geos.com

Expro wireless monitoring on abandoned BP well Aberdeen oilfield service company Expro International has installed its first wireless ´Cable-less Telemetry System´ (CaTS) for monitoring reservoir pressure and temperature in an abandoned subsea well in the UK North Sea, operated by BP Exploration. BP wanted to monitor how the pressure was building up in the well after abandonment, and also to monitor any interference effects from production or injection activity on the nearby Clair platform. Data is transmitted wirelessly to and from the bottom of the well. It can be used for remote control of

downhole instrumentation. In this application, the data is collected, processed and stored at the seabed, and then transmitted to a supply vessel on demand. The pressure and temperature data can then be analysed by reservoir engineers. Expro says that the first data interrogation visit was made in early July this year. Expro believes that wireless communications can also be useful during exploration and appraisal stages, because they enable communication with downhole devices without the hassle of putting in cables. www.expro.com

Telenor Satellite Services acquires Norse Electronics Telenor Satellite Services has acquired the satellite communications business of Norse Technology AS, and also the majority of stock in Norse Electronics. Telenor made the acquisition to strengthen its position as the ‘leading’ communications provider for the North Sea oil and offshore market. Norse Electronics will become part of the ‘customised solutions’ business of Telenor Satellite Services, part of its Sealink broadband maritime services offering.

The company is located in Stavanger. “Adding Norse’s integration and installation capabilities along with our Sealink broadband maritime services, and all located in very close proximity to our Eik global teleport facility, is a formidable combination that will allow us to deliver faster equipment installation, tailored and customized configurations, and complete around-the-clock service and support for global and regional customers,” says Telenor. www.telenorsatellite.com

Track your oilrigs with Inmarsat Delta Wave Communications of Morgan City, Louisiana, has launched a system to track oil rigs over Inmarsat. When the oil rig moves out of its designated location, users can receive a text message or e-mail alert, and then see where the oilrig is on a website. The system was developed and tested during the 2005 Gulf of Mexico hurricane seasons. The per-

sonnel onboard the rig do not need to do anything. It is possible to add additional sensors to the system. www.deltawavecomm.com

September 2006 - digital energy journal

19

Communications and Monitoring ND Satcom VSAT system on 18 drilling / construction vessels

SBSS cable installation project for Papua

German satellite communications company ND Satcom has completed the installation of a global C-band VSAT communications system for an un-named European oil company’s drilling and construction fleet of 18 vessels, in the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans. It also installed three 2-hub stations.

SB Submarine Systems (SBSS) has signed a contract for a cable installation project for offshore engineering company Saipem, for power and remote communication on two gas production platforms off the coast of Bintuni Bay,West Papua, in Indonesia.

The satellite communications is for exchanging operational information (telephone calls, e-mails and providing onboard personnel with a private phone service. The company wanted to install a VSAT system because the communications cost would be cheaper than the Inmarsat system it was using. ND Satcom installed its SkyWan VSAT system, using satellite service from Telespazio of Italy, using MFTDMA DAMA enabling satellite power / bandwidth to be shared

between different vessels of the fleet according to their needs. It agreed a guaranteed service quality. Vessels can send 300 kbps data rates. Data for the Atlantic and Indian regions is routed through Telespazio’s teleport in Fucino, Italy; Pacific data is routed through an Intelsat teleport in California, with a leased line to Italy. Onboard the vessels, it installed a satellite modem for IP routing and data switching. The network is operated by Telespazio of Italy, which also looks after control, management and maintenance of the network. Telespazio has three satellites covering the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific oceans. Vessels can automatically move from one satellite to another without manual intervention. www.ndsatcom.com

20 mbps over 75-250 miles by Troposcatter Radyne Corporation of Phoenix, Arizona, has developed a 20 mpbs Ku band “Troposcatter” communications system, which communicates data over the horizon in the Ku band radio range. The radio data is sent up to the troposphere and bounced back, so it has a maximum range of 75 to 250 miles, longer than most line of sight systems, where the sending terminal has to be in a straight line with the receiving terminal. The company says that oil companies operating offshore have

already expressed interest in using the system for oil rig communications. Interest has also been expressed by the US Military and ‘friendly’ countries in the Middle East, RADN says. There are now three methods of communicating Ku band data: up and down via satellite, horizontally (line of sight) and over the horizon. The system is small enough to fit in one vehicle. www.radn.com/

Implicit Monitoring secures $25m capital Oil and gas remote monitoring company Implicit Monitoring Solutions has secured $25m growth capital from venture capitalists B/K venture capital. The money will be spent on developing Implicit’s Intellisite range of services, and building new sales and marketing strategies. The company wants to be the world leader in remote asset monitoring services for the oil and gas industry. It sells monitoring services by monthly fee, so oil and gas com-

20

panies do not have to make large initial investments in hardware, software and communications infrastructure. The information can be used to improve uptime of field equipment; reduce field labour / transportation costs; simplify production analysis; share data with other systems; and meet reporting requirements. www.implicitmonitoring.com

digital energy journal - September 2006

The customer is BP and Partners’ Tangguh LNG project. BP will use the system to monitor the platforms remotely and use platform control technology. SBSS was selected on the basis of its cable installation and burial methods, experience and service, SBSS says.

The project will take place in Q1 2007, and take about 28 days. “This award of this project for Tangguh is our fourth project in this market sector,” says SBSS. “We look forward to further developing our presence in the Asian gas market.” Meanwhile Derek Greenham, commercial director at SBSS, has moved to SBSS partner company Global Marine, to work in its UK headquarters. His replacement is Dick Borwick, who has 25 year’s experience in the oil and gas industry. www.sbss.com.cn

Stratos microwave comms for 100 Apache platforms Satellite and microwave communications company Stratos has signed a deal with independent oil and gas company Apache to provide microwave communications for over 100 oil and gas platforms in the Gulf of Mexico. The contract is for five years, with a total value of around $19m. It includes repairs to the microwave system damaged in hurricanes last year, and an upgrade of Apache’s entire Gulf of Mexico telecom network. There will be more bandwidth available and back-up systems. Stratos will provide satellite communications services as back-up to the microwave link, to be used to

maintain business continuity after any disasters such as hurricanes. Apache says it has been working with Stratos for several years. www.stratosglobal.com

Caprock support centre in Angola Oil and gas satcom company CapRock Communications has opened a new support centre in Luanda, Angola, staffed with field technicians. The company says that there has been a ‘significant’ increase in demand for satcoms from oil and gas companies in West Africa, as well as engineering and construction

companies. CapRock provides oilfield service companies operating in West Africa with ‘turnkey’ communications solutions and systems integration services, including managing the necessary documentation, certifications and approvals. www.caprock.com

Communications and Monitoring

TII sets up rig remote monitoring over Inmarsat South Carolina company Telecom International Incorporated (TII) is installing remote monitoring services on offshore oil rigs, which collect data such as pressure, temperature, vibration from the rig and send it back to shore, in most cases with a dedicated Inmarsat terminal independent of the main satellite communications link. II’s focus is on making sure staff can get all of the information, from all of the devices, all of the time, in real time, rather than some of the data, some of the time, and with a certain time delay. The company is installing systems in 3 rigs off Brazil; in 10 rigs between Trinidad, Tobago and Venezuela; and 6 rigs on land in Turkmenistan. It is also involved in another project to remotely monitor oil barges in Iraq. Its contractors in most cases are international oil service companies. The Brazil and Trinidad projects send data back to shore over a special Inmarsat MPDS satellite communications device. The Turkmenistan project is for a base rig and 6 exploratory rigs, with four of five staff onboard. For this project, the monitoring data communications will use an iDirect VSAT communications system, also providing voice communications, e-mail and internet access. The Iraq project is to monitor flowmeters onboard barges carrying oil from the Northern oilfields to the port of Basra, being implemented to try to prevent oil thefts from the barges. Currently 200,000 barrels of oil a week are being stolen from the barges at some point along their route. TII will connect the flowmeters to an Inmarsat satellite communications system, so a remote team can be alerted if the flowmeters are removed or if any oil is being unloaded at an unexpected time. Over the past 4 years, TII has installed systems in about 200 locations onshore, particularly in East Texas oilfields and Oklahoma, connecting ‘tens of thousands of devices,’ sending data by cellular, paging or microwave network. Now it is expanding the business into offshore. “Once you go offshore - the complexity and the number of devices expand exponentially - and you add the additional complexity of getting it thousands of miles offshore into the company intranet in real time,” says president Karl Faller. Data being collected includes vibration, revolutions per minute, flowrate, temperature of different devices, intake pressure, surface pressure and temperature, discharge pressure, output voltage, output current, frequency, alarms. Data can be collected from between 15 and 100 different devices on the rig. The systems can be set up to receive data only on request (‘polling’) or get a reading say every ten minutes. So for example, if there is an alarm, personnel can request information from all of the sensors so they can investigate it.

T

digital energy journal - September 2006

“We have a data collector that is able to read or communicate with every type of device regardless of manufacturer, he says. The data collector tags all data sent to shore, so it is possible to work out which specific device the data was generated from and what time the data was generated. The data packets are very small; for example, a small temperature gauge spits out about 4 bytes of information in a temperature reading. Future plans are to incorporate digital photographs into the system, including infra-red and thermographic photographs, even underwater photographs. The photographs can be sent on demand via Inmarsat, or there can be a continual stream of data if it is over a higher bandwidth system.

you a very good tool to make sure you are keeping all these devices maintenance and on schedule.” Staff can use the data to make sure everything is running properly and maintenance tasks are being properly carried out. “We have created a very flexible software system,” he says. “We have over 150 different screen and report configurations - which pretty much cover every aspect of production management.” “If there’s a new device that’s invented today or a new approach to analysing data - we can react quickly and make it.” “We have a very robust software platform that can take the data and make something useful out of it,” says Mr Faller. “We’re approaching being a plug and play company.”

Data processing

The Brazilian and Venezuelan projects use a special Inmarsat terminal manufactured by Thrane and Thrane, which provides packet data services (but has no voice communications), designed as a SCADA data terminal, at a small fraction of traditional satellite costs. The terminal is about 10 inches square. “It’s a really unobtrusive device as for finding a spot for it on the rig,” he says. Karl Faller, president of Telecom International, says that by sending the data back through a completely separate channel to the main oil rig communications channel (normally VSAT), is a way to ensure that the monitoring data gets through immediately, avoiding the data having to compete with phone calls and e-mails. “We could superimpose everything we’re doing on the primary communications network, but we get a really good reception by being able to offer this as a standalone,” he says. “We’re not competing with voice service or a video conference. We have total control.” “In some cases we’re presenting information literally minutes or less than a minute after it has occurred. The data is that fresh,” he says. “One company said they are getting data which previously took 44 days to get.” “To do it properly - its very time sensitive,” he says. “We want the data, when we want the data, in real time.” “We want it every minute, we want it once an hour, we do not want any interruptions - we don’t want a low prioritising. We don’t want to be in competition with the primary communications system on the rig. We need to have the capability of the real time two way interaction.”

All of the data processing is handled in TII’s data centre in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which can display the data however needed, or be programmed to send alerts if the data goes outside a certain range. “We interpret it, characterise it, reformat it - and put it in a usable format,” he says. “We can feed directly onto the web or into a customer’s data centre so they can put it on a corporate intranet,” he says. Mr Faller thinks that one of the most interesting recent developments is how the data can be made available to many different employees in different roles, all formatted to their specific needs, using web hosted software. “In the past, one or more of the things just mentioned has been developed or accomplished, Eg one group in operations would have access to the data,” he says. “What we’ve been able to do is take that data and characterise or format it for a large number of decision makers - or experts throughout the enterprise.” “All this data can be organised to meet the needs of every possible decision maker or expert.” “It’s a fairly robust interrelational database that collects all the information you would want from a device and organises it the way you want it.” “If you are upper management - you can see about how much production. That’s different to the needs of the engine supervisor.” “If you are on the operations side - you can do predictive analysis - you can avoid potential problems that could interrupt production.” “If you are doing routine maintenance it gives

Satcom

www.telecominternationalinc.com

September 2006 - digital energy journal

21

Communications and Monitoring

Sakhalin remote rig monitoring no problems after a year A remote monitoring system installed on an unmanned rig under construction in Sakhalin 800km offshore has had no problems apart from one defective camera, reports Nera, manufacturers of the satellite communications terminal. Piltun-Astokhskoye-B and Lunskoye Platform, under construction in Sakhalin

uring the building phase, the rig can only be accessed by someone dangling from a helicopter, and so it was absolutely critical that all monitoring components would be absolutely reliable. The oil company is Sakhalin Energy Investment Company, joint venture between Shell, Mitsui and Diamond Gas Mitsubishi Corporation. The rig is being built by Aker Kvaerner and Pharos Marine. The system is to remotely monitor two unmanned offshore rigs under construction in Sakhalin. The system sends back data every 15 minutes, including television pictures, fog monitoring, power generator performance, fuel levels, fire control system, doors on onboard containers and platform lights. The data is monitored by Aker Kvaerner`s control room in Oslo. There are two rigs, Piltun-Astokhskoye-B (PA-B), for offshore oil extraction and Lunskoye Platform (LUN-A) for gas. They are linked to the shore by pipeline. The longer term plan is to build fibre optic cables to send data back to shore, but the satellite communications is being used while the rigs are being built. An Inmarsat Fleet 55 system, manufactured by Nera and designed for use onboard deep sea maritime vessels, is used for the satellite communications. The first plan was to use Orbcomm for remote monitoring, but this plan was shelved when the project team discovered that Orbcomm was not type approved for this type of installation and did not have a license to be used in Russia. Aase-Karin Ronningen from Nera reports that the original plan was to use a Nera World Communicator satellite terminal, designed for use on land, but put inside a protective maritime satcom radome, with a small heater (eg a lightbulb) inside to stop the system from freezing. Nera has made a few installations like this at oil and gas installations on land.

D

22

digital energy journal - September 2006

However for the offshore installation, the satcom engineers from JSC Ream Division decided that a more robust system was needed, due to possible vibration of the rig, possible damage due to steam condensation from heating elements inside the radome, and the difficulty in replacing any parts that broke. It chose the Inmarsat Fleet 55 terminal, designed for maritime use. Before doing the installation, engineers from JSC Ream Division went through a special course of study to do installation work, and the whole

“It is a complex array of information and this is the first time Nera has used Fleet F55 in such conditions”.

system, including data loggers and cameras, was tested by Nera in Norway. The rig has data logging equipment supplied by ITAS of Norway. There is a CR1000 measurement and control system by Campbell Scientific Services. It has a 2Mb memory, a 16 bit Hitachi microcontroller with 32 bit internal CPU, and temperature compensated clock. It has a battery to ensure that data and clock time is maintained if there is a problem with the power supply to the unit. Three rugged closed circuit cameras were used, supplied by Hernis of Norway, which have their own wipers and windshield washer fluid. Images from the cameras are recorded and processed by a TeleObserver TO3100. Other sensors were supplied by Pharos Marine. "It’s a complex array of information and this is the first time Nera has used Fleet F55 in such conditions," says Nera. www.nera.no

installing the satellite monitoring equipment onboard the rig

B^a^iVgn
Courtesy Datapath

:ciZgeg^hZ6eea^XVi^dch

BZY^V:ciZgiV^cbZci

Content Delivery & Satellite Solutions Three program tracks, including: • Media & Entertainment • Military, Government, Security, Relief Agencies, and NGO’s • Enterprise Applications

ntary Complime asses for nce P Full Confere ers (a $995 value)! nd-Us en Qualified E 26SE512 wh e d o C e rc Use Sou at registering .com nexpo www.satco

November 29-30, 2006 Javits Convention Center New York, NY www.satconexpo.com

Your SATCON badge also allows you access to the premiere event for High Definition Video and Broadcast Applications ...

Platinum Sponsors:

Gold Sponsor:

www.hdworldshow.com

Media Sponsor:

Automation Roxar multiphase meters to Vetco Gray Roxar has signed letters of intent to supply subsea multiphase meters and subsea wet gas meters to engineering company Vetco Gray, for use in two offshore African fields. Ten subsea multiphase meters will be supplied to a field offshore Angola, and seven subsea wetgas meters will be supplied to a field offshore South Africa. The meters will continuously

measure the amount of oil, condensate, gas and water at the well heads. Roxar says that the meters are lightweight, designed for maximum reliability, performance and flexibility. The meters have a removable canister containing electronics, computer processing and power, so this part can easily be replaced if necessary by remote operated vehicle (ROV).

Umbilical cable with 24 kilovolt power

www.roxar.com

The installation is part of a project to retrofit two subsea wells in BP´s King Complex in the Gulf of Mexico with multiphase pumps. The cable includes both high voltage and low voltage electrical power, fibre optical communications, and chemical injection and lube oil services. The King Complex is tied back to the Marlin Tension Leg Platform, 135km South East of New Orleans, in 988m water depth. It will be more efficient to transport and install a combined power and umbilical cable, rather than separate umbilical and power cables. Nexans says that the concept of integrating a power cable with a subsea umbilical has proven very challenging from both mechanical and electrical design aspects, ensuring that electrical interference between conductors and inductive losses are minimised, also with the challenges of making a cable which can operate at 1700m depth. The cable is being manufactured at Nexans´ plant in Halden, Norway, with the fibre optic and low voltage cables being delivered by the Nexans factory in Rognan, in the North of Norway. Delivery is scheduled for the second half of 2006.

BP America has awarded cable company Nexans a NOK 98m (USD 16m) contract to design and manufacture a 26km, 1700m deep umbilical cable with a 24 kilovolt power connection, believed to be the world´s first.

Roxar multiphase meters - being used offshore South Africa by Vetco Gray

Emerson to automate Nigerian FPSO for Total Oil major Total has chosen Emerson Process Management as main automation contractor for its Akpo Floating Production, Storage and Offloading (FPSO) vessel 200km off the coast of Nigeria. Emerson will digitally automate the FPSO and set up a fast production start-up system. It will also provide co-ordination and consistency between contractors in Europe and South Korea, and be involved in installation, commissioning and start-up in Nigeria. As prime automation contractor, Emerson’s responsibilities include development, installation, configuration, testing and commissioning of the systems, controlling vessel topsides, hull, subsea and radar tank gauging, also integrating the safety system. The automation system will enable optimum process control, asset management and information

delivery to management personnel. The automation architecture will be Emerson’s open standards PlantWeb system, which includes digital automation systems, intelligent field devices and predictive maintenance software. There will be a network of ‘intelligent’ sensors which deliver continuous process and health information to personnel operating the FPSO, with a predictive diagnostics system to enable maintenance tasks to be made before they become critical (proactive maintenance). Emerson will supply its DeltaV digital automation system, its AMS maintenance software, its Intelligent Device Manager, its Rosemount pressure and temperature transmitters, Saab Rosemount TankRadar tank gauging transmitters, Fisher general and severe service control valves, FIELDVUE digital valve controllers and Bettis actuators. Emerson collaborated with Total on the Front End Engineering and

Design (FEED), and has planned a phased delivery of the automation equipment. The water depths are 1100 to 1700 metres. The FPSO is 310m long and 61m wide, with a storage capacity of 2 million barrels of oil. Start-up is planned for the third quarter of 2008, with the gas and condensate field coming on stream in late 2008, with production expected to quickly reach 225,000 barrels of oil per day. Emerson says it has already worked with Total on a number of projects, particularly in West Africa. “The project provides another opportunity to draw from the experience of our European engineering centres who have implemented PlantWeb digital architecture in hundreds of upstream projects, enabling improved safety, availability and operational efficiency,” says Emerson. www.GoToEmerson.com

www.nexans.com

Siemens Eur 35m contract to automate semisub A consortium led by Siemens has won a Eur 35m contract to fit automation, generator, power, telecoms and dynamic positioning systems on a new semi submersible drilling platform, being built at Yantai Raffles Shipyard, China, for Offshore Rig Services of Stavanger. Wärtsilä Finland and Kongsberg Maritime are also in the consortium. The full list of items being supplied includes diesel engine generator sets, propulsion, power distribution, transformers, drives and motors, an uninterruptible power

24

supply (UPS), a dynamic threedimensional positioning system (DP 3), an integrated control and safety system, the telecom system and auxiliary systems. Project management and systems engineering is organised by Siemens Norway; manufacturing of the system is taking place in Norway, Finland, Netherlands, China and various other locations. www.siemens.com/oil-gas

digital energy journal - September 2006

Siemens is providing automation for this new semi submersible

Automation

Weatherford – fibre optic sensing, and life of well information Weatherford has installed the first optical sensing ‘system’ for BP Norway, it is developing fibre optic sensing systems with Statoil, and helped Chevron reduce well failure rates from 30 to 10 per cent. Weatherford has also announced the installation of what it believes to be the first successful offshore permanent in-well optical seismic system, on BP Norway´s G-24 injector well in the Valhall Field. ptical seismic systems can provide high resolution seismic images close to the well bore, and be used to calibrate 4D surface seismic data.

O

They can listen passively for acoustic events (mini explosions), leading to improved understanding of fluid movement through the reservoir. Weatherford has been working with BP Norway for two years to design and build a system which can be deployed in a well. The system includes five 3-component optical accelerometer stations and an optical pressure / temperature gauge, installed inside the production tubing, near the reservoir. The system provides continuous seismic and pressure / temperature data. It is interfaced with the existing permanent ocean bottom cable system for collecting seabed seismic data. “Simultaneous collection of permanent seabed and downhole seismic data represents a significant milestone for the industry,” says Weatherford. BP will use the system to see if there is a relationship between observations made in the well and remote observations of production effects. It will use this knowledge to help improve its management of water injection and production, by knowing more about what was happening underground. The system has accelerometers which monitor active (artificially created) or passive seismic signals. The seismic stations are carried down the well on the production tubing, but have a special clamping system which couples the sensor the casing and decouples it from the tubing when it is in the well.

Statoil project Weatherford has signed a three year ‘technology development co-operation agreement’ with Statoil to develop fibre optic sensing and communication systems, part of Statoil’s Subsea Increased Recovery (SIOR) initiative. Weatherford will build a fibre optic communications network to deliver reservoir, wellbore and subsea data to shore. The two companies will develop downhole optical sensing systems and a fibre optic communication system. Field testing is included in the agreement. Statoil will do pilots on the Norwegian continental shelf. “The goal of the project is to develop smart

sensors and subsea communication infrastructure to improve our overall reservoir and production management,” says Statoil. Weatherford has reached agreements with FMC Kongsberg Subsea and Nexans Norway to work on the communication system. “This project allows Weatherford to increase its optical sensing portfolio and integrate all of these sensors into a new generation subsea communications architecture,” says Weatherford.

monitoring, one can be measure temperature, one can handle four pressure / temperature gauges, or one flowmeter and two pressure / temperature gauges. The systems cost slightly more than standard electrical systems, Weatherford says, but it believes that the reliability and ability to add new capabilities compensates for this. The seismic sensors can be used to map fractures and monitor fluid fronts.

Over 100 optical sensors

Optical sensor case studies

Weatherford has installed over 100 optical pressure / temperature sensors during 2005. This compares to 60 in 2004, 30 in 2003, 40 in 2002, 18 in 2001 and under 10 for 1993 to 2000. Of the 100 optical sensors installed in 2005, 60 were pressure / temperature, 11 flowmeters, 22 distributed temperature sensors, and 7 seismic sensors. It has also installed over 1 million feet of optical cable to support pressure / temperature gauges, single phase / multiphase flowmeters, distributed temperature sensors and seismic sensors. The pressure / temperature gauges can measure the stain on the glass associated with pressure and temperature. The flowmeters measure flow by monitoring dynamic strain in a section of production tubing. When combined with other sensors to work out fluid density and speed of sound transmission, it is possible to work out the flow of all three phases (oil, water, gas). On the distributed temperature system, the whole fibre acts as a sensor, and can give a temperature log for the whole length of the cable. The seismic sensors are tiny, incredibly sensitive accelerometers. The optical sensors are more reliable, stable and flexible than traditional sensors, the company believes. They can work in temperatures of 175 degrees C and pressures of 137.9 MPa. There are no moving parts and no downhole electronic components to degrade or drift. They can take a lot of vibration stress, including from perforation guns nearby. The pressure readings do not drift over time, as most conventional pressure gauges do. The complexity is on the surface, with a unit which transmits light to the sensors, collects the light and analyses the data. They also provide flexibility. A typical cable will have three fibres - one can be used for seismic

One Weatherford customer, operating a long horizontal well in West Africa, wanted to monitor pressure and have a better understanding of the production zone. The production zone had a 1,000m section of sand screen with a lateral half way along. Weatherford installed four optical pressure / temperature gauges, two on each side of the lateral, to monitor reservoir pressure, with a distributed temperature sensor across the whole horizontal section to highlight sections with the greatest flow. Another customer, Statoil Veselfrikk, has a four zone injection well in the North Sea, where water and gas are injected alternately. It has three combination pressure / temperature and flowmeter sensors with remote flow control valves at three of the zones. By being able to control flow into each zone separately, Statoil was able to avoid drilling another injection well, saving over $10m. The permanent optical sensors have also eliminated expensive wireline interventions, Weatherford says. In a third example, in South West France, where natural gas is stored underground, beneath a populated area, Weatherford optical sensors have been used for many years to monitor fluid levels. Monitoring levels from the surface, using seismic technology, would have been ‘expensive, disruptive and less accurate,’ Weatherford says.

Optimising production Weatherford has helped ChevronTexaco reduce annual well failure rates from 30 to 10 per cent on its Cymric field in San Joachim Valley, by using its ‘Life of Well Information System’ software (LOWIS). The Cymric field in San Joachim Valley has 1,000 sucker rod wells in the field, which are described as ‘aging’. Well failure rates rose from 15 per cent to 30

September 2006 - digital energy journal

25

Automation per cent between 1995 and 1997, at which point Chevron installed pump-off controllers and optimisation software at each well, bringing failure rates down to 15 per cent. In 2001, ChevronTexaco wanted to bring in a new system incorporating automation, well surveillance and historical well data, as part of its efforts to standardise data and well management across the company. It hoped that this would reduce well service time and help evaluate / manage failures. It was successful; by 2006, all seven fields of San Joachim were live, and failure rates of the Cymric field had dropped to 10 per cent a year, meaning savings of $6m a year. Chevron and Weatherford went about the project by first establishing their vision, incorporation well surveillance, failure analysis, work-plan services and scorecard reporting.

Project team They put together a project team with enough management backing and resources for the effort. Before starting with the automation, they mapped out Chevron’s business processes to standardise them across fields. Then they mapped software functions in LOWIS to the business processes, and built detailed business flow diagrams. Only after that did they start building the software. “Suppliers tend to walk in with a pat solution and say ‘for X dollars we can automate this for you,’” says Weatherford’s Mr Ormerod. “Then they walk away, and a year later everyone has gone back to their spreadsheets.”

Fibre optics at BT and Alcatel Speakers from BT and Alcatel, at IQPC's Future Fields conference in Amsterdam, talked about how technology is developing for fibre optic technologies

Robert Mainguy, director business development and marketing, oil and gas, with Alcatel, talked about some of the developments with data communications services in the oil and gas industry. "The communications infrastructure is at the heart of this process," he said. "It takes data from sensors in the field." The common communications options are VSAT, getting 1.2mbps over unlimited distance; Microwave, with communications up to 80km at speeds of over 155 mbps; WIMAX at distances up to 15km with speeds up to 25 mbps; and fibre,

26

digital energy journal - September 2006

“Suppliers tend to walk in with a pat solution and say ‘for X dollars we can automate this for you,’” says Weatherford’s Mr Ormerod. “Then they walk away, and a year later everyone has gone back to their spreadsheets.” Our approach is to say “We envision that this system could save you (the client) this much on an ongoing basis, and it will cost you this much on an ongoing basis,” he says. Once the automation system has been put in, Weatherford uses it to find out ways it can improve the business process, and then the improved business process can be used to improve the automation system. Other ChevronTexaco fields in the Mid USA and Gulf of Mexico are also using LOWIS. Weatherford is providing production optimisation services to 100,000 wells in total, 10 per cent of the wells in the world. There are 28,000 in North America; 5,000 in South America; 2,000 in Africa / Europe; 3,000 in the Middle East and 2,000 in the Far East.

going over unlimited distance at data speeds of tens of terabits per second. "They all have their role," he said. WIMAX might be used more in the oil and gas industry, for communications between platforms close to each other, or with nearby vessels. Alcatel is installing a WIMAX system on a Floating Production Storage and Operations (FPSO) unit for Total in Nigeria. For fibre optics, Mr Mainguy said that the benefits were high reliability and independence of the weather, but there can be problems if the cable is not buried deep enough and hit by a ship.Mr Mainguy recommended create a fibre optic ring, so there's always another data routing option if there's a break in the cable anywhere. "Its future proof - there's no bandwidth limitation," he said. Alcatel has put together a subsea monitoring system off the West Coast of Canada using fibre optic cables, and could do this for the oil and gas industry, he said.

Matthew Owen, head of oil and gas industry marketing, BT, talked about how BT is developing fibre optic technology which could be useful in the oil and gas industry.

About people Like many industry commentators, Laurence Ormerod, vice president of solutions architecture for Weatherford’s Production Optimization group, thinks the challenges of installing optimisation systems are more about people than technology. “The real issues are about managing change, managing people, documenting processes so you know what you’re trying to do, and making sure the data is reliable,” he says. “You have to develop the business case, state the benefits you think you’ll get and then quantify and measure those benefits.”

LOWIS LOWIS (Weatherford’s Life of Well Information System) can be used for all different types of oil wells, including sucker rod wells, waterflood, plunger lift, submersible pump, gas lift and free flowing wells. It can be used to manage a number of well intervention processes, including pump changes, sand cleanouts and full offshore rig workovers. LOWIS is appropriate for looking at optimisation over a week / month / year time period. Also in Weatherford’s suite of software tools are ReO for optimising pipelines, separators and pumps for current operations; ReO Forecast, taking a long term view of how the production network should change as the field gets older, taking data from subsurface models; I-DO (intelligent daily operations software) for optimising daily operations taking data from down hole and surface well control equipment. The company likes to stress that it focuses on putting the solution together, not selling pieces of software.

"We spend quite a lot of money and time in communication technology," he said. "We lead the world in this." Any pressure, temperature change or even sound on a fibre optic cable changes the way light passes through it, and so very sophisticated tools can be developed. With a fibre optic cable down a well, it is possible to measure temperatures every metre along the well at 0.1 degrees accuracy. This is a useful tool for pinpointing where oil is entering the well, because it expands and cools as it does so, increasing pressure and causing changes to the temperature. Fibre optic cables can be used as a security tool, because if there is any interference (vibration) near a fibre optic cable, the light pattern changes. This listening capability could be used for many things. For example, a fibre optic cable around a pressure vessel could 'listen' for any sign which could indicate a possible leak. It could also 'hear' a valve closing, proving a secondary reassurance that the control system is working. The fibre system could also immediately detect sand production in a well, because the sand makes a large amount of noise, which would affect the light pattern through the cable. Fibre optics are safe to use in hazardous environments, small, unobtrusive and simple to install.

Automation

Should we have more unmanned platforms? Invensys’ Michael Chmilewski and Stan DeVries believe that US oil and gas companies can learn from the experiences of European ones, which are far more likely to opt for wells to operate unattended by Michael Chmilewski and Stan DeVries, Invensys

he US Minerals Management Service (MMS) reports that only 819 of the roughly 3,500 offshore platforms in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico are normally unattended. But these are in shallow water and most are for gas production (easier to train for and operate remotely). To date, there does not appear to be any major or deepwater/ultra deepwater installation in the Gulf of Mexico that is normally unattended. Whenever a major storm threatens the 3500 offshore platforms in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico, the focus for most is on de-mobilizing personnel and shut-in production. The emphasis is on hurricane evacuation not on continued operation. However elsewhere in the world major energy companies are set up to accomplish hurricane evacuation without interrupting operations. Energy companies operate world-scale, deepwater installations as normally unattended, with a new concept for remote operations known as ‘adaptive span of control’. They have already implemented the ability to operate remotely during normal conditions, and can extend this to operations before and after a storm. Remote operations aren’t a permanent transfer to onshore. Remote operations needs full, adaptive span of control at multiple locations. Technology today addresses traditional challenges, with better use of wireless networked sensors intelligent condition monitoring, and adaptive infrastructure. With system integrity and correct span of control, operating companies and their vendors can safely and frequently change where, when, how, and which people work to prevent or effectively intervene in problems. Best practices in remote operations can help operators achieve higher health and safety performance, higher production availability and reduced operations cost. Best practices require good management of evolving the technology, procedures and culture to continually achieve and accelerate performance. Remote operations applications range from the occasional management of essential operations, called ‘normally attended installations’, to full remote operations, called ‘Normally Unattended Installations’. French energy leader Total, for example, which operates 21 deepwater offshore wet gas platforms in the Netherlands sector of the North Sea, produces a combined 680 Million standard cubic feet per day (scfd) of gas.

T

Total can operate and support its deepwater North Sea gas platforms remotely if it wants to

With the objective of improving health and safety performance, they implemented an approach that allows them to quickly and feasibly adapt the span of control among three offshore and one onshore control centres, as well as ensure consistent and safe technical support from anywhere. This can be described as “operate from anywhere, support from anywhere, best practices everywhere”. They moved from normally attended to normally unattended as a normal approach. The result was a higher HSE benchmark, increased production availability, reduced operations costs and a new culture. Personnel maintain a level of training and use identical procedures for operations, SCADA and safety systems engineering and maintenance. New personnel, whether employees or contractors, are trained before participating. This provides a higher level of operations performance that can be duplicated in other fields.

These are examples of “best practices” in remote operations. In general, the procedures, training, technology and cultural requirements of normally attended installations are less challenging than normally unattended ones. One important aspect of these implementations is the agility to adapt the span of control among multiple control centres, so that operational control can be transferred across any number of locations.

System health The examples above depend upon a foundation of enabling technology that delivered improvements in “system integrity” for safe remote operations and enabled the operating companies to embrace the process for “adaptive span of control”. The foundation for the system integrity model starts with the physical health of the remote operation. Standard SCADA and DCS hardware remain a key

September 2006 - digital energy journal

27

Automation part of the “system”, and the central place for alerting and adapting to system integrity issues. However, the components of any SCADA or DCS must be hardened against all possible environmental conditions (e.g., vibration, temperature, humidity, EMI) and configured with the highest availability (i.e., redundancy) in mind. Another aspect of physical conditioning requires a new approach to condition monitoring technologies that can drive ‘early detection’. Use of advanced technologies such as friction sensors offer vast improvements over traditional vibration sensors, enabling continuous monitoring with measurable indication of condition anytime. Adoption of Wireless Sensor Networking (WSN) in the operation can also greatly increase process awareness with more measurements at less cost with the added benefit of deriving inferential measurements from “soft sensors”. Thus, remote operations can achieve improved condition awareness with greater confidence in equipment health & operations, and the freedom to perform maintenance only when required, instead of when routinely scheduled.

Robust infrastructures Infrastructure robustness of remote operations begins with ensuring the quality of everything from power to telecommunications and operational data. Adherence to best practices to ensure network connections & the IT infrastructure, and rigorous performance of on-line backups of all critical systems remains vitally important for continuity of remote operations. The employment of new wireless communication infrastructures brings an added dimension of mobility to the platform, improving field engineer productivity and efficiency via wireless diagnostics, maintenance, data collection, monitoring and alarming. Likewise, the use of the new standards such as PRODML, PRODuction xML, have begun to enable the consistent integration of disparate systems and production data that otherwise require manual intervention. With such improvements & advances within the Infrastructure, operators can experience increased availability and better operational intelligence.

Security As with all installations in the energy industry today, the adoption of a strong security process within the remote operation is mandatory to safe operations. Use of intrusion detection; encryption; and prevention technologies to avoid computer viruses and worms, unauthorized users, disgruntled employees, denial of service attacks; remain essential to any remote operations.

Wärtsilä power contract for largest mobile drilling unit Power system manafacturer Wärtsilä has won a contract to deliver a total power system for the largest mobile oil drilling unit ever built, the MPF 1000 offshore drilling vessel, to be completed and delivered from Spanish yard Dragados Offshore in the fourth quarter of 2008.

28

digital energy journal - September 2006

Likewise, security policy must eliminate the use of secondary threat vehicles such as ad hoc servers, thumb drives, modems. Operationally, the use of multi-vendor, multiowner systems must provide proper segregation of information and controls to ensure that vendor, partner and government security requirements are met. Security is first and foremost a business process that technology can only enable. Intrinsic security for the Remote Operations can only be achieved through the right architecture & process.

Operational stability Maintaining operational stability is important to any remote operation, especially in the face of stress conditions which limit availability of local personnel. Control systems on the platform must be thoughtfully integrated and inter-locked to adapt and manage potential failures using integrated process information. Added intelligence within control systems designed to follow a “process park” methodology can be used to isolate events instead of forcing a complete shut-down. Safety and critical control systems with expanded input/output and logic working in tandem with online models can also help minimize shutdowns without any sacrifice of safe operation.

Change management Essential to the integrity of any remote operations is the discipline of change management across all aspects of the control systems used to manage production. The actual technology utilized for the SCADA and DCS systems must inherently govern and track operation, configuration and maintenance activities. To implement and maintain rigorous change management, effective systems start today by embracing object management technology at their core, taking advantage of the inherent control of creation, replication and dissemination of applications objects and workflows. With such object management firmly in place, more advanced control systems can deliver quick and easy redeployment of objects for system optimization and thus establish the highest confidence level in the management and documentation of any changes made.

Europeans getting ahead in unattended rigs - Stan de Vries, director Upstream Solutions with simulation and process equipment company Invensys

occur too slowly for teams to identify until it may be too late. It is vitally important therefore that only the “right” people are notified at the “right” time – which means continuous analysis and early predictions of problems. Depending upon the real threat level of an event or predicted outage, different alerts will require different persons to be notified. Thus it is equally important that real alerts are presented in the “right” context so as to avoid (a) overloading a diminishing pool of remote and mobile experts, and (b) exposing operational problems to people who have no need to know. Only by automating, governing, tracking and segregating alerts and related remote support functions from the sensor to the highest level application, can Trustworthy Operations be fully achieved.

Adaptive span of control

At the top of system integrity is the concept of operational vigilance; the constant evaluation of alert conditions that arise in normal operations delivered via a highly effective notification service. While it’s common for operating equipment to deteriorate over time, the conditions that produce equipment problems are often too complex and

Full span of control requires safe and orderly access to all alarms & equipment controls for a given area. This requires better assessment of operational conditions, better management of alarms, and better transfer of span of control and alarms. Supervisors should be able to change assignments among multiple operators and crews at any time. Transferring span of control is never permanent, and the greatest risk is during transfer. The span of control must be adapted when equipment is added, process changes, weather. Transfer is among offshore centers and in both directions between land and offshore. Large scale transfers support “operational roll-back”: as bad weather progresses towards outer platforms, offshore operations can be rolled back to those platforms further away or outside the pending evacuation area. The reverse procedure can also be implemented reliably as off-shore operations are gradually resumed.

The MPF 1000 has been described as the largest and the most versatileoffshore drilling unit ever built. It can combine floating production, storage and offloading with drilling. It is designed for simultaneous drilling and production in deep waters and harsh environments including ultra deep water. The vessel is 290 meters long and has storage capability of one million barrels of oil. The contract, worth over EU 50 million, involves detail design, products, systems and commissioning of the power plant, propulsion, electri-

cal and automation systems. Delivery of the major components will be during the first quarter of 2008. Wärtsilä will deliver eight 16-cylinder Wärtsilä 32 diesel engines with a combined power output of 58,880 kW, generators, medium voltage switchgear, low voltage distribution boards, frequency converters, safety and automation systems (including emergency shut down, fire and gas, power management, vessel automation), a dynamic positioning system, thruster control and information management systems.

Vigilance

Automation

Invensys integrates control systems Control systems giant Invensys has launched a new middleware software suite called InFusion, which makes it easier to gather data from different control systems, display it so that people around the company can see all the necessary information on one screen, and make decisions. t can integrate with control systems, from many different manufacturers including ABB, Honeywell, Rockwell, Schneider, Emerson. Communication is by TCP-IP. There are over 300 interfaces developed so far. The middleware can connect to management systems, such as supplier relationship management / customer relationship management / supply chain management / enterprise resource planning (finance, HR). It will provide business performance measurement, real time finance management, real time business intelligence, business performance improvement. The middleware layers include planning, scheduling, yield management, operations management, site support, alarm analysis, alert management, performance management, system configuration, condition monitoring / diagnostics, device diagnostics. It should help detect and respond to unanticipated problems. The benefits are that management personnel get much better information about how well the plant is operating, and can easily and quickly make adjustments as required. Advanced software tools can be used to monitor the health of equipment, and make predictions about how long equipment will operate for before failure, so maintenance and overhauls can be planned at times they will cause least disruption to operations, while minimising the risk of equipment failure. Invensys imagines a more sophisticated tool for measuring how well equipment is going than the current maximising equipment availability and maximizing utilization. The best route is something between these two. Invensys will release the system in two phases – the first will be to release a system “designed to significantly reduce the cost of automation.” The second is to release a set of performance services to get more value from the plant. There will be two components to the performance services – performance measurement / real time accounting, and performance improvement services. The performance services will be conducted by a team of professionals with 10 years plant engineering experience and accounting MBAs. The software tools are a result of 5 years of development work, Invensys says.

I

systems inside out, as Invensys does, is allowing the systems to integrate with the business management systems. Disparate control systems have been blamed for many things. Operators cannot look at the whole plant as one single entity, they have to manage every part of it separately. Individual systems sound alarms when something is going wrong; but when something goes very badly wrong, the operator just hears a lot of alarms and doesn’t know which ones to respond to The way automation systems have been viewed, Invensys believes, has gradually changed. From 1970s to 1990s, they were seen as equipment to make plants work. From 1990, expectations increased, with optimisation tools. Now the focus is on optimising everything.

Middle layer There are plenty of more benefits to this middle layer. The computer model can process the enormous amounts of data generated by the systems. For example, the large amounts of equipment monitor data can be fed into a computer model, which can estimate quite well if any components are about to fail. Invensys observes that the traditional ways of working out how well plant is working, looking at utilisation and equipment availability, is not necessarily the best way to find out what companies really want to know, which is how much value they are getting out of their equipment. For example, it is not much use knowing if the equipment is available 99 per cent of the time if you don’t know how much of this time it is actually being used for.

Conversely, it might be harmful to the equipment to operate it 99 per cent of time, the risk of unscheduled breakdown can be higher, than if you give the equipment a few moments of rest or maintenance. Some people focus on maximizing availability – although this is not so much use of the equipment is not utilized when it is available. But focusing on maximizing utilization is not so helpful either because there may ultimately be less equipment breakdowns if the equipment is not driven into the ground. It can be useful in maintenance – eg analyse equipment in real time, real time failure mode analysis. It can help with fault finding. A key component is the ‘asset dashboard,’ where people all over the world can see all the information they need in one place (see photograph). Information being shown includes plant video monitoring, business value portal, plant scorecard, compressor availability analysis, operational performance measures, KPI analysis, condition monitoring and maintenance schedules.

Security There are plenty of security concerns about the idea of being able to adjust plant over the internet. Security issues quickly arise with this kind of system – because it becomes theoretically possible to control dangerous plant systems over the internet. Invensys employs security staff to analyse the risks, and work out how to achieve security but without losing any of the openness. Invensys points out that in the US, 90 per cent of systems have an online connection. In Europe its 15 per cent. Many plant managers say they don’t want an online connection.

The problem Connecting business systems with plant is something which has been desired for a long time, something which many oil and gas companies have been slowly developing over the past few years. Whilst trying to connect plant to business management systems is not new, what is probably new is the depth to which Invensys is doing it, and the fact that a company which understands the control

The InFusion Collaboration Wall can also be used to provide plant operators, maintenance technicians, engineers, and managers with a shared view of process control, maintenance, performance, and business application displays to encourage and facilitate creative collaboration

September 2006 - digital energy journal

29

Asset Management Logistic Management Maintenance Management Procurement Management Project Management Remote Management Quality & Safety Management

We maintain your energy! Software solutions for efficient, productive and profitable Asset Management. www.spectec.net/oilandgas

[email protected]