Top 8 Researches and Projects in Petroleum Industry

1) NANOTECHNOLOGY

THE SCIENCE OF MINI BUT MIGHTY…

Though nanorobots may sound as futuristic as flying saucers or teleportation, Oil & Gas industry is known for making the impossible happen!!

In June 2010, Saudi Aramco carried out the industry’s first field test of reservoir nano-agents, successfully demonstrating their applicability.  EXPEC ARC has analyzed 850 core plugs from the Arab-D reservoir in Ghawar and mapped the distribution of the pore throat sizes.

Nano-robots or ‘Reservoir-robots’ (resbots) are the most capable devices to independently & smartly analyze the reservoir properties, while also continuously transfer this information in real-time to the surface computers & engineers. These nanobots can be inserted into the mud system & be circulated via polar bonds between them & the particles in mud; or can be constructed in such a manner so that they posses sensors, on board driving mechanism & micro computers as well as an interface mechanism. Thus they can be maneuvered by engineers at the surface via “joysticks”, instructing them to propel or stop at will! On reaching the reservoir, these nanorobots may help to delineate the extent of the reservoir, map fractures and faults in the rock, recognize and define pathways of higher permeability, identify the bypassed oil locations in the field, optimize well placement, design & generate more realistic geological models of the asset. They may also be used to target delivery of chemicals deep into the reservoir to recover more oil and gas.

Nanorobots can also be designed to store the information in an on-board massive memory & astoundingly… a single nano-structured data storage device, measuring a volume of about the size of a single human liver cell, can store an amount of information equivalent to a standard library!!

Transmission to surface can be done by means of electro-magnetic waves & detected by means of probes on the surface. They facilitate wireless communication & real time surveillance. Thus in comparison to the conventional logging, they can save rig hours & provide real time information which is more accurate & precise as compared to the presently used techniques such as LWD & MWD.

Imagine ten years from now, you go for an interview to a petroleum company and the first question the interviewer asks happens to be …”How good are you at video games?!” 

2) BUGS & BEETLES ARE FRIENDS!!

Next time before swashing a bug, ponder over. You might be harming a worthy Production Engineer!

With over 1.25 million known species & an estimated five hundred thousand still to be classified, earth’s ‘Bugs’ outnumbered all the other animals combined. They make up 95% percent of all the planet’s species & an astounding 40% of the planet’s biomass!

But why are we eulogizing bugs in this blog!? For two worthy reasons:

REASON NO 1: There are lots of bugs & scorpions near rigs. So you should get used to their ubiquity in nature…

REASON NO 2: Maersk Oil Company has discovered a way to use bugs to prevent pipelines from freezing in the Danish North!!

Scandinavian beetles & cold water fishes produce special kind of proteins to prevent themselves from freezing in the icy cold environments they live in. Tremendous amount of research is being done to investigate whether this mechanism can be replicated and used as a hydrate inhibition tool to stop ice formation inside pipelines and wells. Although the imagination does turn riot with the news of beetles potentially coming to aid freezing pipelines, the concept is sound.

Maersk Oil Company has entered into a collaborative 4 year project that aims to boost IOR and prolong North Sea operations by using bio technology to create new solutions & overcome the challenges of mature field production. The company has also announced a US $100 million investment over the next ten years in a new research facility at the Qatar Science & Technology Park in Doha.

Hence, next time when you watch “The Bug’s Life”, I am sure you will feel more reverence.

3) BIONIC WELLS 

MIMICKING MOTHER NATURE...

A tree root seeks the wet area in soil, extending a branch of roots to that zone & cuts off the branch once that area dries up, growing another branch to a different moist area. Bionic wells mimic trees, but follow oil rather than water! Once the vertical segment of the well is drilled, the well is left to drill laterals on its own. A smart lateral extends to a non drained oil-bearing zone, cuts off that lateral once the zone gets ‘dried out’ & extends another lateral to a different zone & so on…

Though this concept may seem too futuristic, the industry has achieved much of that dream. What has happened to date in Saudi Aramco’s Exploration and Petroleum Engineering Center - Advanced Research Center (EXPEC ARC), gives us a clear preview of the future well technology development & built-in high-level artificial intelligence. In various pilot study experiments, starting with the vertical wells (like root of a simple tree), horizontal wells were drilled (a more sophisticated root system), and then multilaterals were drilled (similar to tree roots with several branches). Thereafter, smart downhole-control valves were added that could choke specific laterals & effectively cut off those branches (the way a natural root system cuts off its branches); then downhole monitoring (ICVs) & surface controls were added that enabled analyzing the reservoir-fluid properties & predict the onset of water (similar to the root deciding when a zone has dried up). All this is a reality now!

The remaining technology is advancement in drilling that would allow the well to “drill for itself”. Admittedly, this goal is not easy, but techniques such as coiled-tubing drilling & drilling by fluid jetting exist, while others such as laser drilling are being researched upon!

4) PASSIVE SEISMIC MONITORING 

LISTENING TO WHAT THE RESERVOIR IS SAYING…

Thousands of induced earthquakes occur frequently, during various phases of drilling & production, that have very faint magnitudes of −1, −2 & lower and have no tangible effect. Their signals cannot be recorded by normal means. Ideas are being developed to research on a new technology, which is capable of sensing these natural signals, so as to get extremely accurate real time information of even the deepest secrets of the reservoir.

Passive-seismic monitoring involves recording of this faint  seismicity (sometimes called microseismicity) at the reservoir level to infer the distribution of faults and fractures around the wellbore & between the wells and thereby map the flow conduits away from the well location. This monitoring is accomplished without active seismic sources such as vibrators or dynamite. This approach enables monitoring the reservoir in real time rather than time-lapsed (as with 4D seismic), and it has the potential of introducing a new method of analyzing and monitoring fluid migration through the reservoir, pushing the effectiveness of reservoir management to a new plateau! Though this technology is still in its infancy, it is growing at an explosive rate and it holds promise to revolutionize how seismic data are gathered and exploited.

Several countries of the world have deployed research groups that are zealously researching on it. Among these are USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Peru, Indonesia and even India! A recent passive-monitoring symposium was oversubscribed, and received attendees from more than 50 countries. This covered PSM applications ranging from fault characterization & monitoring stimulation jobs, to deducing the effect of production and injection. Microseismic activity has been successfully detected and located in rocks ranging from unconsolidated sands, to chalks and crystalline rocks.

5) ARCTIC DRILLING & ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION...

Alaska's outer continental shelf has a starkly beautiful ecosystem populated by polar bears, bowhead whales and arctic seabirds...And it is also a bonanza for oil companies. According to government estimates, up to 23% of the oil and 21% of the natural gas remaining in the U.S. might be found here. This is attracting oil companies from around the world to launch their adventurous projects in this region. However, these ambitious entrepreneurs are not the only ones with interest in the Arctic land. Several environmentalists & wild life protection agencies too have launched various anti-drilling campaigns in the Arctic region, thus forcing oil companies to take several measures to protect Arctic’s environment, in an attempt to convince the “nature’s centuries”.

ICE ROADS AND DRILLING PADS

One such technique is to build ice structures! Instead of building a gravel pad for exploration drilling & bitumen roads for transportation, companies are now building temporary pads of ice, which disappear after the exploration well has been drilled. Temporary ice roads have long been used to support winter exploration drilling on the North Slope. These vanish in the summer season without leaving a trace!

RESEARCH ON MICROBES THAT ‘EAT SPILLS’

Any oil spill will biodegrade more slowly in the Arctic Ocean than it would in warmer seas. "For every 10 °C decline in temperature, the rate of biodegradation decreases by a factor of two," says Ronald Atlas, professor of biology at the University of Louisville. An oil spill will degrade perhaps one-fourth as quickly in the Arctic, where sea temperatures hover between 5 to 10 °C, than in the Gulf of Mexico, where water temperatures can average 25 °C” he says.

Hence, Oil companies have launched several research projects on environment protection, in case of a spill. Mr. Kostka, a scholar of marine microbiology says, that while some cold- loving microbes are unique to the Arctic, researchers have shown that many of the microbial species there, are the same as in the Gulf of Mexico. These microbes, such as ‘Alcanivorax’, oxidize petroleum hydrocarbons during respiration. "They just do it more slowly up there because respiration is a temperature-dependent enzymatic process," Kostka says.

Several studies have been done by a research team from the University of Alaska Fairbanks and NewFields at the Barrow Arctic Research Center (BARC) located on the North Slope of Alaska on the coast of the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas. During the planning and execution of this research, a technical advisory committee comprising of an international group of experts and resource agency personnel, provided recommendations for the research design. The results of the research will be presented by PhD student, Kelly McFarlin, on Sunday May 22nd at the 111th General Meeting American Society for Microbiology in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Seawater containing natural microorganisms was collected off the coast of Barrow, Alaska, and experiments were conducted in a temperature-controlled laboratory. Water collected in fall and winter was tested under natural temperature conditions, which ranged from -1 to +2°C (30-36°F). Crude oil from the Alaska North Slope was added to bottles of seawater. The biodegradation of oil was measured over time in two different ways: by measuring the amount of oil remaining in containers of seawater and by measuring the amount of oxygen used by the microbes. Oil remaining in seawater was measured chemically using gas chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry.

The University of Alaska Fairbanks team’s next goal is to identify the arctic oil-eating microbes using cutting edge DNA sequencing technology. The group is also assessing the toxicity of chemically dispersed and non-chemically dispersed oil to Arctic juvenile and larval fish (cod and sculpin) and marine invertebrates (copepods).

6) WONDERS OF DRILLING ENGINEERING...

The most important oil well ever drilled was in the middle of quiet farm country in northwestern Pennsylvania in 1859. This was one of the first successful oil wells that were drilled for the sole purpose of finding oil. Little did man realize where his journey would carry him to…

SNAKE WELLS-

The Champion West Field provided companies with an extremely difficult challenge. This field was characterized by numerous elongated fault plugs, each containing about 100 reservoirs, isolated by shale layers! Conventional wells failed to produce the fields economically in this complex geology. The answer was to a drill well that literally ‘weaved’ these reservoirs together in a snaky pattern. This well, that could pass through the multilayered highly dipping reservoirs, hence creating multiple drainage voids in each sand zone, was thus called the Snake Well!

This well proved to be so successful & lucrative, that today Brunei Shell Petroleum (idea initiator) is operating 14 Snake Wells!

THE FISH HOOK WELLS

These are “Up-Side Down” wells! These are drilled from bottom to the top & completed from toe to heel. This well was drilled in the Syrian North flank Field. The well was first drilled vertically & then a deviation of 120 degrees upwards was done. This was to produce efficiently in the complex geology of the region.

MAXIMIUM RESERVOIR CONTACT MULTI-LATERAL   WELLS-

Multilateral-well technology is revolutionizing the way the reservoirs are accessed by wells. The ability to create wells with multiple branches that can target widely spaced reservoir compartments, provides engineers unlimited options in optimizing economic extraction of oil and gas. Along with this opportunity, however, also comes the inherent complexity of these wells’ architectures.

Due to its various technical & economical advantages, Haradh III field of Saudi Aramko, relied exclusively on such wells to produce 300,000 B/D from 32 smart MRC wells!

DESIGNER WELLS

Another innovation is the designer well! These wells are drilled with a high degree of precision to reach small oil targets or to reach through or around faults to isolated traps. This is made possible by the use of three-dimensional seismic, which allows reservoir engineers to plot the locations of faults and small oil traps within 100 feet of accuracy.

Tight turns in drilling are now possible, thanks to the advancement in technology. Drillers can now turn wells 55 degrees in 100 feet and 100 degrees, about a quarter circle, in 200 feet. Tighter turns, as tight as 100 degrees in 100 feet, too have been made, but it was in rocks that were solid enough to support "open hole" drilling, without a liner. Tight turns with a liner are a first for the North Slope drillers.

One designer well drilled earlier this year turned 270 degrees, almost a full circle. Another turned 180 degrees to tap four separate oil pockets, with a horizontal length of 5,800 feet.

A full-circle well, to be drilled 360 degrees, is planned for the near future in the Arctic.

7) SMART FLUIDS

 OVER COMING TOUGH CHALLENGES

Conventional drilling, completion & stimulation fluids used in drilling & production operations are extremely complex. They also have to be added with additives to meet the changes in the environments commonly associated with a suite of drilling hazards & in these environments conventional fluids often perform poorly.

Meet Smart fluids—A major advancement that can revolutionize our industry!

By sensing the environment & smartly tuning their particles’ properties accordingly, smart fluids can virtually adjust to any environment!

These fluids are capable of changing their chemistry & physical properties to produce the best result. As an example, such fluids can hydrate & swell in the presence of water, plugging the pores & preventing water movement, while shedding the water movement & dehydrating and contracting in the presence of oil; thus achieving rig-less shut in & saving expenditures in multitude! Tremendous amount of research is being done on the usage of smart fluids for smart diversion stimulation fluid for better zonal coverage, segregation of oil and water pathways, wettability alteration agents & so on. This technology is progressing swiftly due to relative permeability modifiers & smart emulsified gels

In the future, we shall eventually be able to deploy smart fluids deeper into the reservoir to change its properties on a much larger scale. These fluids will be custom-fit & will impart the desired behavior in the reservoir automatically. In other words, they could be bull-headed into the reservoir & left to their own means to work automatically, without requiring any sophisticated techniques, such as zonal isolation & coiled tubing.

8) ARTIFICIAL ISLANDS...

ExxonMobil is to use a technology developed in the Russian Arctic to boost output from the giant Upper Zakum oilfield, off the coast of Abu Dhabi- namely the Artificial Islands!

Artificial islands have been designed to create ‘lands’ on seas so as to do onshore drilling at the offshore! Building islands at the offshore, as compared to deploying extremely expensive offshore rigs & equipments, reduces the cost tremendously. In the Gulf, ExxonMobil's plan of using "extended reach" drilling from four artificial islands purpose-built for use as drilling platforms, will cut reduce the cost of expensive offshore drilling tremendously & increase the total volume of crude recovered from Upper Zakum to reach an exceptionally high, 70 per cent of oil in place, while raising the production capacity to 750,000 barrels per day (bpd), from about 550,000 bpd.

                                                        

Andrew Swiger, the senior vice president of ExxonMobil, said: "We didn't come up with the concept of an artificial island. This had been thought about by other people”. The  real challenge lies in making it work when it's a really big oilfield and to minimize the cost and the environmental footprint and ultimately drain the oil in the reservoir”

The answer lay in the engineering work the company had undertaken on Sakhalin Island, off the Pacific coast of Siberia, to improve the precision and length of the horizontal well bores it could drill to exploit hard oil reserves.

                                                                                WRITTEN BY: BATOOL ARHAMNA HAIDER
                                                                                Weatherford Oil Tool Ltd.
                                                                                 Middle East.
                                                                                 batool.haider@me.weatherford.com 
                                                                                          

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OIL SPILL DISASTERS

 The non ending demand of oil has forced us to turn light minded to the detrimental environmental effects caused during its exploration and production. Right from its extraction, transportation and from the products refined from it, about 210 million gallons of petroleum enters the sea each year worldwide.  Another additional 180 million gallons enter the ocean through natural seeps.

WORST OIL DISASTERS (OIL SPILLS):

Let us first have a flash back of some of the worst environmental disasters related to oil, that have pummelled our planet:

March 1967: The Torrey Canyon oil supertanker was shipwrecked off the western coast of Cornwall, England, causing a major environmental disaster. This was the first major oil spill at sea.

March 16, 1978:  The Amoco Cadiz, an oil tanker owned by the company Amoco (now emerged with BP) sank near the Northwest coasts of France, resulting in the spilling of   68,684,000 US Gallons of crude oil (1,635,000 barrels). This is the largest oil spill of its kind (spill from an oil tanker) in History!

June 3, 1979: The Ixtoc-I exploratory oil well suffered a blowout resulting in the third largest oil spill and the second largest accidental spill in history.

November 20, 1980: A Texaco oil rig drilled into a salt mine transforming the Lake Peigneur, a freshwater lake before the accident, into a salt water lake!

July 6, 1988: Piper Alpha disaster- An explosion and the resulting fire on a North Sea oil production platform killed 167 men & the total insured loss was about US$ 3.4 billion. To date, this is rated as the world's worst offshore oil disaster in terms both of lives lost and impact to industry.

March 24, 1989: The Exxon Valdez, an oil tanker bound for Long Beach, California, hit Prince William Sound's Bligh Reef dumping an estimated 40.9 million lites, or 250,000 barrels of crude oil into the sea. As many as 250,000 seabirds died, as well as at least 2,800 sea otters, approximately 12 river otters, 300 harbour seals, 247 bald eagles, 22 orcas, and billions of salmon and herring eggs were destroyed.  The effects of the spill continue to be felt 20 years later.

March 23, 2005: An explosion occurred at a British Petroleum refinery in Texas City, Texas. It is one of the largest in the world, processing 433,000 barrels of crude oil per day. Over 100 were injured and 15 were confirmed dead.

April 20, 2010: an explosion on BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig plummeted 5 million barrels of oil in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 workers and precipitating one of the worst oil spills in history. The well was capped on July 15 but not permanently sealed until September 19.

ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES DUE TO OIL SPILLS, LEAKAGES & CATASTROPHIC BLOW-OUTS:

Oil and gas extraction and transportation can cause severe impact on the ecosystem during routine maintenance and production operations. Gas is flared with consequent emissions, large quantity of water is withdrawn due to contamination, drinking water is polluted with additives and solid waste & other toxic volatile fluids are deliberately dumped in the oceans. This affects air and water quality and can form vast plumes below the surface. Birds typically ingest oil that covers their feathers, causing kidney damage, altered liver function, and digestive tract irritation. This results in the decrease of fauna population, thus affecting the food chain in the ecosystem.

CONTROLLING OIL SPILLS - NEED OF THE TIME

There are several conditions that enhance an oil spill. These include temperature, water currents, wind speed and surface-sea conditions. However, it is essential that oil spills be contained and their impact be minimized. Ensuring that the equipment is checked and tested before final use and safe & careful handling of materials & equipments should be made mandatory. Taking safety & precautionary measures for the personnel should be placed at the top most position of the priority list.

DON’T PANIC – THE INDUSTRY IS WORKING ON IT!!

Though the industry is trying its level best to minimize the catastrophic damage done by oil spills all around the world, it cannot nullify them completely. Though accidental errors are always there, measures are being taken to reduce their impact on environment. Consistent public-private partnership is required and flexible federal laws need to be promulgated. Technology and innovation has already made this job easier and the recovery of spilled fluids has been made more efficient.

Here are the oil spill recovery methods being deployed by the industry these days:

MECHANICAL RECOVERY & CONTAINMENT EQUIPMENT:

These are the equipments that contain the spilled oil, capture it and then transmit it to the wells or tanks for storage where the spilled fluids are properly dispersed or degraded. Besides controlling the leakage they reduce the possibility of polluting the shorelines.

BOOMS:

These are flat or round floatation devices, that converge oil channels accumulating them into thick surface layers for easier recovery.

BARRIERS:

These are a temporary measure to hold oil at place until more sophisticated equipment arrives. Barriers are made of plastic, wood, old oil drums, tires or fire-hoses. Barriers are built by bulldozers, by pushing a wall of sand toward the sensitive shore-line.

 SKIMMERS:

These self-propelled, efficient devices that depend on shore conditions. Skimmers trap oil in a disc or an enclosure and squeeze it into a recovery tank. However they are prone to clogging and jamming by floating debris.

SORBENTS:

Oil absorbent materials or fabrics (sorbents) recover liquids by absorption and adsorption. Sorbents need to be both oleophilic (oil attracting) and hydrophobic (water-repellent) to combat oil spills. They should not be heavy, else they might sink.

DISPERSANTS:

Dispersants are biological or chemical dispersing agents sprayed on the affected area to break oil into simpler smaller particles so it can be easily degraded or accumulated at the beach as visible oil. However, they can’t be sprayed on densely populated areas and their long-term use is not recommended. Their effectiveness is affected by temperature, humidity and water salinity.

IN-SITU BURNING OF OIL:

In-situ burning is the combustion of a spilled product at the site of the spill. It offers a simple, rapid, efficient and inexpensive means of reducing the net impact of an oil spill. It exposes safety and health hazards to the response team who may be exposed to higher levels of toxic gases. Major in-situ pollutants are SO₂, CO, NO₂, PAHs (polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons) and particulates (soot, fog, dust and mists).

NANOSPONGES:

Nanosponges are made of tiny metal nanowire mesh that can be used like a sponge to soak up any oil in water.

These nanowires are 20 nanometers in diameter and made up of potassium manganese oxide which is a paper-like material that can sit on top of water, without getting wet, while absorbing 20 times its weight, in oil.  

MICROBES

Ultra-Microbes(tm), have been approved by the EPA and added to the list of approved products for applications involving oil spills. Having been tested extensively by an Italian university and found to be harmless to plant and animal life and safe for the environment, the Ultra-Microbes(tm) are added to containers of sea water and mixed. This mixture is then be sprayed onto the ocean surface to immediately start remediating the oil. The microbes quickly digest the oil as a food source and break it down into carbon, CO2 and a white protein that is basically fish and plant food. The oil becomes non-hazardous, and when all oil is digested the microbes die.

                                                                                                      WRITTEN BY: SYED ALI MEHDI,

                                                                                                                                 AYESHA ZAKI.

REFERENCES:

1.       http://library.thinkquest.org/CR0215471/oil_spills.htm

2.       http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_spill

3.       http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/science-scope/engineers-build-underwater-dome-to-stop-oil-spill-from-spreading/1441

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DIGITAL OILFIELD AND THE CLOUD

Digital Oilfield and the Cloud

By Osama Hasan Khan

With the advent of Digital Oilfields, IT architecture must deal with tremendous volumes of data throughout the oilfield lifecycle. With thousands of sensors, streaming data, the emphasis has shifted from data acquisition and storage, to managing and leveraging the information. Thus, it is not just about how much data you have; it is about what you do with it? The current IT scenario has failed to exploit the benefits of this data volume to the fullest.

In the meanwhile, computing world has seen a revolution by the name of “Cloud Computing”.  This buzzword has been resonating in technology circles for the last two to three years. Some call it the third IT industry revolution after the rise of Personal Computers and the Internet. But what actually is Cloud Computing? Cloud computing refers to the processing and storage of your data on computers and data centers based away from your own premises.  You are utilizing computing power that you do not own, and which is located somewhere else, in “the cloud”. Cloud computing derives its name from the fact that cloud shaped icons are used to depict the internet on network diagrams signifying that the end-user does not need to know the details of what is happening inside the internet (i.e. it is cloudy) but still can be sure that the data transmitted will arrive at its destination.

Imagine a world where software applications are no longer constrained by hardware requirements, where you can consume as much computing power as you need without having to buy a supercomputer. More importantly, imagine a world where you pay only for the computing power that you utilize just like you pay for electricity or any other utility. You do not have to buy a power plant to get electricity; you just pay for the amount that you use. And if you are still not fascinated by this idea, then imagine a world where you can use a reservoir simulator or any other computationally intensive software on your mobile or any other handheld device that has a web browser. Cloud computing is the concept that will be taking us into this world; if it hasn’t done so already.

Cloud computing brings us into the era of web applications banishing the desktop applications. A desktop application is one which is installed on your PC and uses your computer’s resources to run. A desktop application is constrained by your computer’s hardware capability. A web application, on the other hand, is installed and executes on a remote computer (a server) and you can access it through your PC using only a web browser. The advantage lies in the fact that the application is now running on the server, which is a much powerful computer than your PC. Your PC acts as a terminal, just sending the inputs and displaying the outputs. The major processing part is being done on the server. Thus, your PC’s responsibilities are drastically diminished and so are the hardware requirements.

Cloud computing is not an outrageously new idea. In fact, it has been around, since the arrival of the internet. There is good chance that you have already used some form of Cloud Computing. If you have an e-mail account with a web-based e-mail service like Hotmail, Yahoo, Mail or Gmail, you probably know that instead of running an e-mail program on your computer, you log in to a Web e-mail account remotely through your browser. The software and storage for your account doesn't exist on your computer - it's on the service's computer cloud. What’s new is that more and more software are now being written to be used over the internet. There are web-based word processing programs like Google Docs, photo and video editing programs like Pixlr and JayCut and more. In fact, you name a desktop based application and there is good chance that you will find a web-based counterpart, now or in the very-near future.

But, what has Cloud computing got to do with the Oil and Gas Industry? The computing requirements of this industry have always been high and will become increasingly higher with the arrival of Digital Oilfields. The petroleum industry is dominated by demand for data, high performance computing and collaboration tools. This requires servers, networks, bandwidth, data storage, power and a place to house and cool it. Additionally, staff is required for administration, maintenance and support.

Construction of such on-premises IT infrastructure saddles E&P companies with high pfront costs. The maintenance of these facilities is also a concern. Cloud Computing provides a solution for this problem, often called “Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)”. IT industry giants like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, IBM and others have built huge data centers across the globe and offer this infrastructure to clients as a service. This means that an E&P company can store all of its data in these remote data-centers eliminating the need for an on-premises data center. This also makes the data available anywhere, anytime thus facilitating advanced collaborative environments. The client company pays only for the computing resources it utilizes usually on an hourly or monthly basis which drastically reduces the upfront cost.

Another advantage of IaaS is scalability. Suppose that due to some new operation, the computing requirement of the client increases. In a conventional setup, this would require purchase and installation of new equipment which is both expensive and time-consuming. And what if the computing demand decreases later on? The surplus capability will be wasted. But with IaaS, the client can easily increase or decrease the computing resources that it has acquired by merely a few clicks ensuring efficient utilization of resources.

Software as a Service (SaaS) is another attractive aspect of Cloud Computing. This stipulates that you no longer need to buy expensive software and install it on a local machine. Instead, the software is installed on a remote computer (in the cloud) and can be accessed through a browser. The software vendor charges you on a pay-per-use basis i.e. you pay as much as you use the software. If the need for the software is eliminated, you cancel your subscription and stop paying. If a new version of the software is released, you don’t need to buy it again. All you need is to transfer your subscription to the newer version thus ensuring that you have the latest capabilities at hand all the time.

The penetration of Cloud computing in the Petroleum industry is encouraging but not as aggressive when compared with its infiltration in other industries. According to IDC’s 2010 Vertical Group Survey, 10.3% of oil and gas companies are currently using or implementing cloud computing and 7% have cloud computing on their technology road map (Figure 3).

The main reason behind this somewhat lethargic approach is doubts regarding data privacy and security. The protection of trade-secrets and sensitive data such as well-logs needs to be ensured to increase the confidence of upstream companies in investing this technology. This has led to greater adoption by the oil and gas industry of the “private” cloud rather than the “public” cloud. The private cloud is designed for restricted access to a single enterprise. While this might be a viable option for industry giants, the smaller companies must benefit from the public cloud to avoid the high CAPEX associated with setting up a private cloud. A combination of public and private cloud features, referred to as hybrid cloud, is another option.

Software as a service is quickly proving its worth for the E&P industry. iStore (The Information Store) has developed the industry’s first Software as a Service offering by launching its PetroTrek® Digital Oilfield Online solution. Baker Hughes is using Microsoft’s cloud services to conduct complex computations such as well log processing and in one case, has cut simulation times from nine months to less than 30 days, according to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. Cloud Computing has also helped Baker Hughes in its green-IT initiative aimed at reducing the impact of its IT operations on the environment. Advanced Seismic Technologies, a seismic processing software developer, has developed a cloud-based seismic imaging and processing software called Oasis® that will eradicate the need for high-performance computing clusters to be installed on-site. Oasis provides velocity model building, graphical representation of seismic data, creation of seismic data subsets, and other capabilities. Emerson has also tested its reservoir modeling software Roxar RMS on Amazon EC2 (Amazon’s cloud offering). Other high performance computing applications are expected to be deployed in the cloud soon.

Cloud computing has enabled the smaller independent operators to use the same state-of-the-art software technologies utilized by the super-majors thereby leveling the playing field and enabling the benefits of the digital oilfield technology - increased asset performance, reduced cycle time, improved safety and enhanced business decisions - to be exploited across the board.

                                                                                 WRITTEN BY: OSAMA HASAN KHAN

REFERENCES:

1.       “How Cloud Computing works?” howstuffworks.com

2.       “A roadmap for Cloud Computing in Upstream”, by Oscar Teoh and Ben Parker

3.       “Cloud Computing Can Be Applied For Reservoir Modeling” by Tyson Bridger, Emerson Process Management

4.       “Oil and Gas: Into the Cloud?” by Jill Feblowitz, Vice President, IDC Energy Insights

5.       Microsoft Case Study: Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 – Advanced Seismic Technologies.

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